A Critical Communication Approach

Communication has long been considered a “soft skill.” I challenge that misconception here and explain why that very term undervalues the skill from the start, how it affects one’s behaviour and effectiveness, and why many find it quite hard.

In her book Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, Dr. Brené Brown (2021) encapsulates George Lowenstein’s (1994) work, explaining that “we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can become curious, [for] we aren’t curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about” (p. 64). Therefore, I believe that reflecting on our everyday use of language, particularly the gendered use of language and the implications for education, is important and necessary. Too often “soft skills” are overlooked and considered as inherent instead of acquirable (Martin, 2019), and I suggest that changing the term “soft” to describe such skills would change the connotations surrounding them and increase their value.

In various contexts, “soft” is synonymous with “weakness” and therefore often undervalued in professional environments such as academia. Through my professional roles, I have shared many conversations with industry leaders who describe the need for improved effectiveness of interpersonal communication and acknowledge that this skill set is not always innate. Could it be that the importance of communication skills was overlooked in the pursuit of more academically rigorous and unique capabilities? Has the skill set been undervalued because of its relational positioning (Corbin & White, 2009) and traditionally feminine connotations? Has the accelerated rise of communication technologies affected our interpersonal interactions? Has communication been taken for granted as inherently natural and therefore unteachable? Perhaps.

Luckily, the research shows that communication effectiveness can be learned (Corbin & White, 2009), and as I share with my students it is one thing to have a good idea, but it is another thing to be able to communicate that idea effectively. Communication does not always come easily and should be fundamentally valued in leadership. Language is important. If we reconsider the socio-cultural value of our lexicon and its implications for our perceptions, we will start to understand the roots of everyday terminology and how a simple turn of phrase is often far more complex than we realize.

This re-evaluation of terms and perceptions is the same process that I invite my students to engage in each semester. I encourage them to be “deconstructionists,” challenging the messages that they see in their everyday lives, including the readings and texts used in my courses. Learning the practice of deconstruction improves an understanding of the motive behind the message and the considerable impact that the message can have on our opinions. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (2010, p. 74) wrote, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and to expand on schools of thought and acquired knowledge we must first encourage a learning, and an unlearning, of language.

How We Speak

As educators, we have a responsibility to understand the implications of our language choices and the weight of our words. What we do or do not say matters. We can motivate, persuade, encourage, undermine, exclude, invite, and limit our students’ experiences through our language. A simple illustration of the power of language is the following. With a colleague’s encouragement, I stopped asking my students “do you have any questions?” Instead, I started asking them “what are your questions?” I was pleasantly surprised at how this simple change in phrasing elicited an increased student response. To demonstrate further the complexity and power of language, its impacts on women in leadership, and the importance of critically reflective practices, I share the following narratives from my peers.

When reflecting on her experiences in leadership and education, a middle-school teacher in the private school system lamented her initial approach to leadership. At her first opportunity to lead in an educational space, she emulated leaders with whom she had experience, but her behaviour was met with resistance and failed. From her self-reflective process, she figured out why this position felt so unnatural to her. She realized that the discomfort stemmed from the behaviour that she thought was expected of leaders: authoritarian, tough, and unilateral, qualities traditionally seen as masculine. Interestingly, she described a positive shift in the workplace climate, and personal confidence, when a woman stepped into her school’s senior leadership position and led with kindness, empathy, and collaboration. Suddenly, the middle-school teacher saw herself represented in leadership and felt more confident to pursue future opportunities to lead. When we see ourselves represented in leadership positions, we believe that we can become leaders too.

Relationships are positioned on a continuum of confirmation and disconfirmation (Corbin & White, 2009). To create a climate of confirmation, we demonstrate recognition, acknowledgement, and endorsement. When teaching this to students, I ask them to consider important relationships in their lives, determine where they would be placed on the continuum, and reflect on why they would be placed there. Next I encourage students to include their relationships with themselves on the continuum and to consider that how we feel about ourselves affects how we communicate with others. One way to understand the power of language is to reflect on how we speak to ourselves about ourselves.

As educators, we have a responsibility to ensure diverse representation across our materials, readings, and contents and to encourage and amplify various voices through course forums, discussion posts, and group work. As a leader, are you providing an online climate in which students feel safe, brave, recognized, and supported to participate in their learning? Do your online spaces allow students to connect in a positive climate of trust and build community?

How We Are Spoken About

A professor teaching in an online environment referred to recent course evaluations to illustrate the language used to describe her work, contributions, and skills. She prefaced the example with an impressive list of descriptors often received when summarizing her leadership qualities and teaching style. The words were again (unsurprisingly) common for the women with whom I spoke and mostly centred on traditionally “feminine” qualities that we are socialized to admire, or expect, in working women. Words used in the course evaluations and professional reviews included empathetic, enthusiastic, attention (to detail), organized, passionate, accommodating, collaborative, encouraging, and curious. Although admirable qualities, they are often undervalued when juxtaposed with the commendable qualities of their male counterparts.

The specific example shared from her course evaluations was “she is a really nice, friendly, and adorable professor. I like her a lot.” Although it was complimentary, the professor wondered whether her male colleagues were described in the same way. I was curious too. So, for the sake of comparison, I shared her question with a male colleague. Positive comments for him included phrases such as “the professor is smart” and “well dressed”; although subjective, these terms connote professionalism, unlike “adorable,” and are examples of the juxtaposition mentioned above.

This language pattern affects women disproportionately in the workplace. Although intended positively, it lacks the professionalism and functional reasoning from an important stakeholder group that one would highlight in an application for a promotion, potentially limiting opportunities for advancement.

Caretaking Leadership

Women have a long-standing reputation as the “primary” caregivers in their family structures, especially women in the “ ‘sandwich’ generation” (Miller, 1981), those who care for both their aging parents and their children. These caretaking duties come with time and financial stressors and demand a high level of energy, thought, and attention that can be difficult to utilize in market-driven systems. Because these duties tend to fall disproportionately to women, it can be difficult for them to maintain educational and professional aspirations. Opportunities might be limited; the expectations, and assumed limitations, are different. Remaining reasonably flexible in timelines and deadlines in our online educational spaces would be an equitable consideration regarding our students.

I believe that caretaking leaves should be considered intrinsic to the culture of a workplace, not detrimental to individuals’ long-term success, financially and positionally. I argue that this type of resumé gap should be equitably valued as the switching of professional roles, highlighting the acquired skills of time management, prioritization, active listening, and problem solving. Two benefits of online educational spaces in this context are providing women educators with flexibility and balance while limiting barriers for women who want access to education.

I would not be able to maintain any semblance of a “life-work balance” if not for the intricate support network, relationships, and connections (see Capra, 2010) that share child-rearing responsibilities for my three young children. I rely heavily on my husband, early childhood educators, grandparents, siblings, friends, and colleagues, various nested systems, flows, and cycles to sustain a dynamic balance needed to survive, and I hope thrive, in my roles as a mother and an educator.

Learning in Critical Reflection

Through the discipline of interpersonal communication, I invite students to examine their relationships with themselves, their families, their new and old friends, the media, their environments, and how what they know and have experienced have been influenced by and through these connections. I am continuously exploring creative ways in which to deliver material and drive student engagement for “buy in” to the critically reflective, and sometimes uncomfortable, process in which I ask students to participate.

Critical reflection and critical self-reflection can be differentiated by understanding a person’s particular focus of thought. Gray (2007, p. 497) explains the former as “assessment of the validity of one’s assumptions, examining both sources and consequences,” whereas the latter is “reassigning the way one has posed problems and one’s orientation to perceiving, believing, and acting.” Gray continues to reference Mezirow’s (1990) work to explain how “reflecting critically in these ways encourages learning at a deeper, transformative level” (p. 497).

Tools, by definition, help us to perform more efficiently (Gray, 2007), so it makes sense that incorporating critical reflective tools into our teaching and learning spaces can be effective in fostering and promoting the process of reflection among students. I believe that, as students move through their professional and personal lives, these are the types of tools that will be continually applied, referenced, and remembered long after the disciplinary material is relevant.

My online distance education students often span the globe and its time zones, and they have varying cultural upbringings and value and belief systems, so the chance to communicate peer to peer in a supportive, encouraging, and reflective environment gives them space in which to learn, and unlearn, a lot about themselves. I see this most at play inside my communication labs—a mandatory experiential learning component of our introductory courses. I provide opportunities, asynchronously, for my online students to break out into small groups to share their thoughts, opinions, and experiences in relation to the weekly reading material. I monitor these groups but encourage students to be leaders in their learning by sharing their own impressions and moving the conversations forward through peer-to-peer feedback. A portion of their grades is based on these components of participation. This space for critical self-reflection, story sharing, and intercultural learning has proven to be effective and credited for their deepest learning of course material.

I hope that the learning experience looks something like this: engage, learn, question, apply, reflect, share, repeat. The process includes assigning activities that allow students to apply theory to experience, testing their initial reactions/understandings in their real-life scenarios, learn (and unlearn) the impacts of the various concepts on their interpersonal relationships, and consider how these relationships influence their perceptions of the world around them. Our rural location should no longer be a barrier to pursuing educational and professional goals and expanding our understanding of the world and our relationship with it.

Many of my university students over the past decade have been first-generation students from small, post-industrial communities, and having the opportunity to network and learn with people from neighbouring provinces, countries, and continents offers them a global experience. I work hard to make the asynchronous learning environment feel as connected and community based as possible, a supportive space in which to reflect, deconstruct, and explore. I recognize that coming from a discipline that studies the communicative behaviour of people allows for ease regarding these methods of teaching and learning, but I believe that there is a benefit in this type of engagement across disciplines.

A peer and professor of archaeology recently highlighted the importance of telling stories in her classrooms to facilitate learning, and this practice makes her an effective educator both from her own perspective and from her students’ perspectives.

Through my graduate studies, I found myself studying areas of knowledge familiar from my previous educational experiences, at least at first glance. However, I have easily pulled threads from sustainability scholarship and tied them to communication theory, especially in the context of educational spaces and well-being. My opportunities to reflect and connect have been plenty, and I have benefited from the spaces created to learn from classmates, many of whom have a stronger scientific background.

I have not yet experienced anything that requires more mental flexibility than parenting, especially while being a working parent. I had to explore flexible systems upon my return to work to be successful. Gaining an understanding of the importance of ecological cycles and systems, feedback loops, and networks through application to my personal experience was twofold: it allowed me to break down and understand the disciplinary jargon as well as the complexity and importance of reciprocity between person and planet more effectively. This not only advanced my understanding of specific course content but also strengthened my hypothesis that an element of critical reflection should be present across disciplines to help students learn most effectively.

Considerations

Interpersonal communication is cyclical. There is no real beginning or end. How we interpret messages is influenced by communication before the interaction, and that interaction can influence how we perceive what comes next. What will students take from your online educational environments? Will lessons transcend academic or professional pursuits? How can you plant seeds of thought to grow and have impacts on their future thought processes? We can lead by example, encourage learning and unlearning, and facilitate reflective practices through our intentional communication. We can encourage students to understand their places in and relationships with the disciplines.

In addition to rethinking how we share disciplinary knowledge, I encourage critical reflection on our long-standing, culturally reflexive, value-driven impressions of what it means to be masculine or feminine. We can create a world of opportunity for all of us by reimagining how to express emotions effectively, communicate thoughts and ideas clearly, enforce rules and regulations equitably, educate students inclusively, and identify and demonstrate leadership qualities continuously.

Before you continue on to the next chapter, I will leave you with another quotation from Adam Grant (2021, p. 203): “I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking.”

References

• Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.
• Capra, F., Center for Ecoliteracy. (2010). Ecological literacy—Parts 1–3 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=vohcled-kto
• Corbin, C., & White, D. (2009). Interpersonal communication: A cultural approach (5th ed.). Cape Breton University Press.
• COSWL (Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics). (2016). Guidelines for inclusive language. Linguistic Society of America. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/guidelines-inclusive-language
• Grant, A. M. (2021). Think again: The power of knowing what you don’t know. Viking.
• Gray, D. E. (2007). Facilitating management learning: Developing critical reflection through reflective tools. Management Learning, 38(5), 495–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507607083204
• Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75
• Martin, B. H. (2019). The artistry of innovation: Increasing teachers’ artistic quotient for innovative efficacy. Canadian Journal of Education, 42(2), 576–604. https://journals.sfu.ca/cje/index.php/cje-rce/article/view/3755
• Mezirow, J. (1990). How critical reflection triggers transformative learning. In J. Mezirow (Ed.), Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning (pp. 1–20). Jossey-Bass.
• Miller, D. A. (1981). The “sandwich” generation: Adult children of the aging. Social Work, 26(5), 419–423. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/26.5.419
• Vandenbosch, B. (2022, July 20). 3 ways online learning can narrow the higher education and workforce gender gap. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/online-learning-workforce-gender-gap/
• Wittgenstein, L. (2010). Tractatus logico-philosophicus [eBook edition].Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf