Morning Session – Table VI

TABLE VI

Facilitators:
Shoya Zichy, Author and Seminar Leader
Wendy Ryden, Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, Long Island University, CW Post Campus

Questions:
1) Think back to an instance of miscommunication that involved you in some way. How did you recognize the problem? Why did it arise? How might it have been avoided? What common themes arise in your discussion of this question?

2) How does listening factor into effective communication? What does it mean to listen effectively? How might effective listening be fostered or taught in both academic and business settings.

Think about the issue of miscommunication in the classroom.

Students don’t realize how they come across sometimes on e-mail. They can be alienating, can push your buttons… they can create hostile situations or a disembodied communication between teacher and student. E-mail heightens ethnic, generational and racial divides.

One of the reasons why there is miscommuncation in the classroom is that students do not listen. The ones who were able to communicate were well-prepared, they took notes on their notebooks, read e-mails from the professor, etc.

Writing and CUNY becoming open access. Mina Shaugnessy’s book Errors and Expectations; English and composition professors should be analyzing student errors/mistakes. Where do mistakes take place and how? When there are mistakes, we have to treat them as important doors to solve a miscommunication problem. Different kinds of mistakes:

1. willful miscommunication
2. miscommunication due to cultural differences
3. miscommunication due to language difficulties

Expectations and the communication process are linked. You have to take accountability and responsibility for miscommunication. You have to take extra steps to establish proper communication. Students think that it is not their responsibility to communicate. It is the instructors’ “job” to communicate. Therefore, they don’t need to be actively engaged in the class, “I don’t need to listen carefully.” This is due to low accountability. The professors let students get away with it.

Students really don’t take responsibility unless you provide them with enough guidance about what you expect from them and clarify the tasks in the syllabus. You have to make it clear to students what are you going to cover.

The point is that there are different types of learners as well as communicators.

Think about the issue of miscommunication in the professional world:

Expectations are important in miscommunication in the business world. People usually do not expect to clearly communicate common goals but get things done. We are all oriented towards getting things done fast, fast, fast. We don’t have time to figure cultural differences out. For instances, people don’t try to figure out cultural differences that gets into the way of communication.

For instance the fact that people don’t put salutations in e-mails can offend others. This could be a cultural expectation… Salutation could be an important expectation in some cultures.

On the other hand this could be a matter of format. For instance you don’t expect a salutation in a Memo.

We should have a task related goal and not a relationship related goal to have a good communication. I have a task to do and deal with the faculty…My job is not to create a relational goal.

Even if it is a task, it is always relational. You cannot rule relations out of the tasks to be done.

How does listening factor into effective communication?

The question of rhetoric: We expect that the speaker and author be responsible in terms of rhetorical efficiency. But, what is the responsibility of the audience? Doesn’t the audience have a responsibility? What happens if we shift the emphasis on the audience?

If you are listening you seem to have so much more time than the speaker. In public speaking the challenge is to keep a listener interested. Listening is a discipline and requires a silent dialogical engagement.

Critical vs. empathetic listening:

There are different kinds of listening. We have to enforce and clarify the kind of listening we want from the audience. The audience has to have some guidance and be held responsible. Miscommunication due to English…

Listening is hard work and people are cognitively lazy. It goes against human nature. The students are also like that. They will think that if they are not graded they will not listen. Students are so worried about what they are going to say that they don’t listen to others. They are wrapped out with their own ego and what they want to say.

In business environment this can be a big problem. The cognitive laziness influences the business environment.

The movie “Office Space” as an example… People listen just ‘enough’ to get by. They do the minimum that is expected instead of focusing on the big picture

Listening is so important in sales. It is so important to listen to customers and this shows in sale figures. Dr. Marshall Rosenberg (Non violent communication) talks about emphatic listening. The first question that we had was about something that was lacking. I would suggest a more positive query based on “Appreciative inquiry”. What gives life to an organization?

AI starts with a long interview. Two people sit together and talk (these people within the same organization have never seen each other, etc.) So the purpose is to create ‘connections’ within the organization through the organization.

One of the reasons worked is that appreciative approach is that it makes people more appreciative of each other. Another point about lazy listeners is that we have a limited attention span. A 10-15 minute lecture is the limit than you have to include an activity.

Communication requires a lot of cultural context. Within higher-ed, there are two tendencies:

1. Our job is to make sure that we establish cultural contexts, ‘sign posts’ ;
2. It is not our job to provide this context. We have to teach people the tools to find that contextual information about culture.

One of our major challenges is to define context. The students may not know historical context or emotional context, etc. Or we can have situational context issues.

Multicultural college education is a challenge. We have to provide tools to students to teach the tools to achieve effective communication.

Understanding our differences and acting on our commonality is really important to focus on the commonality and appreciation in order to establish communication.

Cultural judgments can play an important role in your reactions to others. It is important therefore to establish an emphatic relationship.

We make predictions about our future interactions with people. When we decide that future interaction will be negative than we do not interact with people.

What is the Issue that the group is going to focus on?

Proposal 1: Establishing common ground for communication

(It is easier if the goals are shared. If the goals are not shared it could be hard to find a common ground.)

Proposal 2: How to deal with hidden agendas?

Proposal 3: What is the role of listening in uncovering commonalities?

Proposal 4: Objective Witnessing and Context…

Proposal 5: How do we do a better job listening, observing and intending to contextual information to improve communication?

Proposal 6: How do we use listening to find common ground to avoid miscommunication?