Complexity of Communication

My group of PhD-students at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design attended a course “Schoolarly Chritisism II” on the 9-th, 10-th and to 11-th of March. We prepared to present and critique a relevant PhD thesis to our fellow students/“opponents”, answer to their questions.

The thesis I presented was written by Marit Holm Hopperstad and is about children’s meaning-making through drawing in classroom settings. The drawings she peresented were results of inter-subjective, multimodal meaning-making because the children spoke to each other and negotiated meaning in each other drawings. Verbal and visual communication forms supported each other. (The goat drawings are form one of my kindergarten projects - made by the same boy before and after a close examination of the goat that had visited the kindergarten that day in 2005.)

The presentations were leaded by the professor Halina Dunin-Woyseth. With her broad competence in research, supervising and teaching she easily recognized what we needed to know more about, she gave us some “tools” for better understanding, and suggested relevant books. With her accommodating and recognizing way of communication, Halina made the discussions in to enjoyable, motivating sessions that stimulated my reflections and curiosity to learn more.

Some educational settings are more fruitful than others. – Why? Being a teacher on teacher education, I often ask this question... I believe that “successful communication” is important for learning. All those small smiles, acknowledging nodding and eye-contacts that are a part of a multimodal communication, are powerful signs of respect and interest that can make an educational setting flourishe. In opposite, if a teacher is authoritarian, uninterested or bored, his attitude might infect the students. In the cases where teacher and students are more equal and show respect to each other, the communication seem to be more fluent and productive (in educational terms).

Understanding is influenced by expectations to each other, activity in the communication contexts, relationship between the persons and their roles in the situation. (Here I refer to Michael Halliday’s functional linguistics, the way my colleague Eva Maagerø describes it in her book “Språket som mening” (2005) – Language as Meaning.)

To illustrate the point about expectations and roles, I’ll tell you about my personal experience, where cultural differences additionally complicated the communication. The example is from a kindergarten project where parents were invited to contribute in the activities with children. The man I’ll tell you about was a father to a four years old girl (besides being a father to five older children). They were refugees in Norway, but he had learned to speak Norwegian at worked at a pizza restaurant. In this communication context a group of 15 kindergarten children stood in form of him in the kitchen of his pizza restaurant, while he was showing them how to make Arabic bread. Four and five years old children were curiously watching him putting different ingredients into a large mixer he had placed between them on the floor. The children, usually energetic and loud, how were completely silent. We had agreed that he was to tell the children what he was doing, but he might have been a bit nervous, and remained silent himself. To help him start talking, I asked him: “What is that?” He stared at me for a second, and then fetched another ingredient. I got impatient and worried – didn’t he remember what we had talked about during our preparations for this activity? I repeated: “What’s that?!” He looked at me again and said: “What’s wrong with you!? You know what this is!!”



His answer made me instantly understand that I didn’t succeed in my indirect way of communication. I had taken it for granted that he knew that I didn’t ask him stupid questions to get answers for my self, but that I wanted him to tell the children. I took it for granted that his understanding of communication with children was the same and mine! I academic communication I’ll have to know better than to expect others to have the same position and understanding as I do…

In communication through written texts, and academic writing, the chances to fail are larger - I wouldn’t even be able to see the facial expressions on my reader’s faces, and wouldn’t even know if they fell a sleep whiled reading my theses! To prevent this I will have to imagine them and have them on my mind during my writing process...

Dealing with a multidisciplinary study, in my imagination I’ll have to create different audience from a variety of fields that I touch on to. This worries me! Will I succeed in addressing different fields of knowledge that obviously have different relationship to genres and ways of writing, language traditions, use of concepts etc… Will I be able to organize my article based thesis in a way that different articles, published in different journals in different fields, fit in the same thesis?

The critique of the thesis presented on the Schoolarly Chritisism II has shown me that there are many possible ways of writing an article based thesis. But there are also many limitations I should know about – at least I should know about my own limitations…