Strategies For Effective Communication

           

         

Having a basic understanding of cultural diversity is the key to effective cross-cultural communications. When I communicate with people from different cultures or groups the first strategy that I have to learn is at least their language of communication.When communicating with families, you can ask questions to find out how families would like to communicate.

                                                         
                               

            The second strategy I use to establish communication is to get to know a little about the person; I have a colleague who is from Lima, Peru. We had the privilege of obtaining our early childhood degree at the same school and now we are working in the same child development center but with different age children. She speaks English but is her first language is Spanish.  She has customs and beliefs that are different than mine. She celebrates holidays from her country and the US.   I found that my colleague and I shared a lot of similarities in the way that we do things in everyday life i.e. religion,  family customs, and hobbies. In our profession as early childhood educators since my colleague is bilingual, she helps me to communicate with parents who I may interact with that speak English as a second language. The point is that when we learn to communicate with others who are different, we can enhance our knowledge and at the same time gain some valuable information.  

            When it’s hard to communicate with families from different cultures I have found that a third effective strategy that I use to communicate is combining communication skills.  It works best when establishing communication and trying to get my message across to the person who I may be taking.  I use verbal and nonverbal communication skills. My nonverbal skills including body language, making eye to eye contact and listening  make it easier to describe things that I may not be able to say in their language.

Photos retrieved from

 Communication Stock Photos, Illustrations, and Vector Art. (n.d.). Retrieved May 21, 2016, from http://www.shutterstock.com/s/communication/search.html

Communication(TV Show)

Black-ish

The show that I decided to watch is called Blackish on ABC.The episode I watched was "Daddy Dre Care". I wanted to watch the show but missed the first season so I want to wait until I get time to start from the beginning.

  I presume the characters in the show are related. By their actions, I assume that the man and woman are married with four children and that an older woman also lives with them in a beautiful house. They have a close-knit family where the father works at a large company where he is one of the owners. I think the Mom is a nurse or works in a hospital   because she is wearing hospital scrubs.  I presume the older woman lives there or is just visiting the family.

Feeling and expressing based on the nonverbal behavior you are observing while sound is turned off

In this week's plot by their actions, the family looks like they are all getting sick one by one starting with except for the father. The father is spraying stuff down around the house. He's washing everything down and wearing a mask. He looks like he is trying to stay away from everyone but is forced to take care of the house. The older woman is the first to get sick; next is the children and finally the mother. The keep showing pictures of the older women eating some food at a party she attended.  Next, they switch to one of the children eating some of the food that the older woman brought home. I am presuming that they have food poisoning and that everybody ate some of the food except for the father.  

 

    For some reason, the mother and what I presume is her mother are put in a separate room from the children and stay in the same bed. From their actions it seems It seems they are very close, and it’s a time when they care catching up on some lost moments from the mom’s childhood. They are confined to the bed and can’t move around the house like the children. They are sharing pictures, talking, laughing and relaxing while battling their sickness. 

Meanwhile, the father is is trying to keep the house clean things around the house and seems to be bonding more with the children by his actions.

Everyone is starting to get better, and the mom finally gets out the bed and come downstairs.  She sees that the children are fine and is smiling at what is going on. The children are all laughing and having fun in a makeshift tent that Dad made downstairs. She is smiling because the dad is rolling around with the children in the tent. 

                                                  

  In the end, Mom and Dad are sitting on the couch, and I presumed she was showing him that her temperature had finally broke, and she was feeling better. The father was smiling, so I presumed he was happy that it was finally all over.

What assumptions did you make about the characters and plot based on the ways in which you interpreted the communication you observed?

I did make the right assumption that the father had to take care of the family because they were all getting sick but I had the plot entirely wrong. I thought that they had food poisoning by their actions, but they were all coming down with the flu. The father never had to take care of the house. It started with who I now know is the father’s mother, not the mother’s mother. To my surprise, I misread what I thought were a mother and daughter reminiscing about old times while they were sick. The mother and grandmother do not get along but are confined to the bed together. They start to talk more and learn things about each other. They start to develop a mutual respect for each other. We can all be around each other and really never know each other if we don’t share information

The children depend on their mother to do a lot of things for them and are not accustomed to being taken care of by their father

 My "aha" moment was at the end of the show where I thought the Mom and Dad were smiling because the children seemed to be happy and she was amazed that the Dad had taken over her responsibilities. In reality, they were hugging because Mom had just told him that she was pregnant and that is why she was sick, not the flu.

Would your assumptions have been more correct if you had been watching a show you know well?

   My assumptions would have been better because I would know the background of each character and the history of how things happen of the show.   


 

What I have learned.

Nonverbal communication is worth a thousand words.  It reinforces verbal communication and sometimes it sends mixed signals. It is important to recognize our nonverbal communication i.e. facial expressions,  gestures and eye contact that we make can be stronger than verbal communication when we are interacting with other people.

Most often we judge what’s going on to quickly.  What we perceive may not be a reality. It is interesting and funny because I saw a quote today from an unknown author(n.d) who states "Do not judge the story by the chapter you walked in on.” People and things are not always what they appear. (O'Hair, Wiemann, Mullin, & Teven,  2015)


 

References:

O'Hair, D., Wiemann, M., Mullin, D. I., & Teven, J.  (2015). Real communication (3rd. ed). New York: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Unknown author (n.d), Retrieved 14 May 14, 2014 from www.facebook.com