My Communication Style

     Wow!  This one really worried me this week.  I have often been told that I am intimidating and aggressive and this is not something that I am proud of.  I have worked on it a lot and have gotten a lot better as I have aged.  I had my husband, son, and a coworker all take this assessment to see how theirs compared to mine.  I did this because my husband knows me better than anyone on this earth, because my son and I constantly but heads and he states that I am intimidating, and because I wanted to get a perspective from a coworker.
     When I did the self assessments, I got a 44 on anxiety, a 66 on moderate, and a 39 on listening styles.  The anxiety score shows that I have a mild anxiety in some situations and that I am at ease in others and that I don't worry a great deal about communicating.  This is true.  I have spent a lot of years trying to refine the art of communication and I have gotten rather comfortable with communicating effectively.  However, I do get nervous when I have to speak to those that I don't already know well and don't have relationships with.
     The score of 66 put me in the moderate range of verbal aggressiveness and said that this showed a good balance between being respectful and arguing fairly.  It shows that I can attack the facts, rather than the person holding the facts.
     The score of 39 on listing styles did not state which group that would put me in.  Reading through the groups, I feel that I would fall between a group one and a group two.  I am very action oriented, which people can find intimidating.  I am also people oriented, which can cloud proper judgment. 
     Much to my surprise, all three people taking these assessments had scores very similar to mine.  Some of them varied by a couple of points, but I was still in the same boxes.  I learned more by talking to these people, especially my son.  I couldn't believe that his scores for me were not way different than mine, since we disagree so often.  I asked him how this could be, since he always states that I am so intimidating.  He said that I intimidate him because I am so smart!  That really made me laugh out loud.  I am apparently not intimidating to him because I am aggressive.  Rather, he knows that I am going to be tough to argue with because I am no fool!  His teenage manipulations won't work on me.  That really gave me a tickle!  He also always tells me that I don't ever listen, yet his scores did not reflect this about me.  When I asked him about this, he said that what he means is that he can't ever get me to change my mind.  What a little scamp!  My husband and coworker both stated that I am a very strong communicator, but that I am also very kind and very fair.  That made me feel good.  My husband said that people are intimidated by me because I am a good communicator and this leaves people feeling unarmed and worried that they will not perform at the same standards that I set. 
     I am glad that these three feel that I am a good communicator.  However, even my own boss has told me that people find me intimidating.  I want to be a real tough gal communicator, but this does me no good if I am unapproachable or if people are intimidated by me.  My communication goals are to 1. Soften up, 2. Listen more than I talk, and 3. Soften up!

     When I think about different culture groups that I am around, I have to admit that there is really not a wide variety of cultures that I am exposed to.  As a child, I was rarely around those of other cultures.  I live in a very rural town with all white residents.  It always has been that way.  Most of the families are pretty similar.  Of course we are all different, but there is not a wide array of diversity.  I work about 40 miles away and closer to the city.  Where I work, there are people of other languages, ethnicities, languages, etc., but still not anything like the diversity found within cities.  I was going to have a friend of mine (who is African American) watch my eight year old son, but I was very worried.  I figured that he would be like, "Oh, so that is how black people take out their trash"... or, "Wow!  Black people eat chips, too"... or many other things like this.  Not that he has been taught anything negative about other ethnicities, but he has never been exposed to those who are different than him.  It would be a wonderful learning experience for him, but I didn't want to put my friend through that!  My childhood was much like that.  I had no clue how people from other socioeconomic statuses, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc. lived because I was never able to build relationships with people from other cultures because my town is so rural, Christian, and white.
     I do talk to people from other cultures differently.  I talk to children in a louder tone and in a very sing song voice.  I constantly touch them, pat their backs, and rub their arms and backs as I talk to them.  I have some Christian friends that I don't cuss around and some fellow cursing friends that I cuss like the devil around!  I am open and honest with my husband, but not so with others.  I am a professional business woman at work and I use a lot of logic over emotion.  When I am with my family, I use more emotion than logic.  I have a loud, boisterous friend and I notice that I get loud and boisterous when I communicate with her.  I think that we start learning at a young age (from our experiences) the different ways that it is considered to be acceptable to communicate with others.  We also catch on to the ways that others wish for us to communicate with them and also we learn what seems to be effective.  This means adapting the way that we communicate, based on who we are communicating with.

 

 
       This week, the assignment was to watch a segment of a show with the sound turned off and then watch it again with the sound turned on.  I decided to watch part of an episode for Fuller House.  My children have been watching it and I had yet to see an episode.  So, I turned off the volume.  The character of Kimmie entered the house with a really good looking man.  I tried really hard to figure out what they were talking about, but I couldn't.  The man's facial expressions showed a lot of confusion and showed that he felt like what she was saying didn't make a lot of sense.  Kimmie goes upstairs and DJ walks in.  She face shows shock that someone is in the house, but then she smiles and sticks her hand out for a handshake.  I could tell by the exchange between the two that they were making introductions.  DJ talks to this man and I can tell that she is telling him to follow her upstairs.  The man seems confused and I could tell that there was some mistake made; that DJ had made an incorrect assumption as to why the man was at the house.  He follows her upstairs to the bathroom and starts to take off his shirt.  She looks horrified and shocked and puts her hands up to tell him to stop.  When I go back and watch it with the sound on, I see that Kimmie brought this man home from a dating service to meet DJ.  DJ had called a plumber to fix the toilet and when she walks into the room, she assumes that this is the plumber.  Although I could tell that there was a huge misunderstanding from watching without sound, I really didn't know what the misunderstanding was about, until I watched with sound.  I was amazed at just how much I really could pick up without the verbal aspect.  The verbal communication helped to really fine tune my understanding and provide greater detail, but I pick up the basics of what was transpiring, just by watching facial expression and body language.

Effective Communicator
     When I think of a person in my life that I feel is a wonderful communicator, I think of our Human Resources consultant at work.  I find that I think of someone that is better at certain things than I am.  This woman is always fair.  She is always calm.  She listens well and waits until someone is done talking.  She even jots things down as you speak, so that she can remember to come back to things that you have said after you are done talking.  She is kind and she remains objective.  Most of all, she can speak very calmly and never lets emotions overtake her.  I think that this is what I struggle with the most.  I often become very emotional and this causes me to behave in ways that make me completely ineffective as a communicator.  Once I become emotional, I have lost any ground that I might have had to be able to communicate effectively.  This woman that I speak of never becomes emotional.  She is kind, calm, fair, unbiased, professional, unemotional, and listens very well.  These things are all things that I feel make her a very effective communicator and someone that I would like to be able to model when I need to communicate with others.

 

     My hope is that we can all live and work together in harmony.  My hope is for peace, love, and understanding.  World peace is not too much to hope for, right?!  When I work with families from diverse backgrounds, my hope is that I am able to express how much I respect them and how much I truly want what is best for them.  My hope is that I can do my part to help families without causing offense in any way.  My hope is that one day every single baby in this world can be born on equal ground with every other  human in this world.
     My goal for the early childhood field would be that every family is taught their importance in their child's education.  It is true that parents/family are the most important person in a child's education.  As educators, we can be so much more effective with the engagement of families.  I feel that if families are truly engaged and truly see their importance, then they can bring so much more to the field to educate us on their cultures and make us even more aware of each unique family dynamic.  This would really go a long way to helping us to understand and promote equity, social justice, and support for diversity.
     Thanks so much to each of my classmates and to Dr. Davis for a wonderful learning experience this course.  I have learned so much from each of you and the things that I have learned I will carry with me for my entire life.  Go spread the message, my friends!

 

 

 

Albania

 

 

 

I chose Albania as the country that my new family would be coming from as they entered into my program.  I just pulled up a list of all countries and it was the first to catch my eye!  I had several ideas as to what I would do to prepare myself and my program for the family that would be coming from Albania.  I think that the first would be to set about educating myself and my staff.  We would need to find out as much as we could about Albania, like the government, history, capital, politics, ethnicities, educational programs, languages, and other cultural features.  I feel like it would be a great idea to contact the previous program in Albania and talk to the staff there about a typical day in their program, to get a good idea of what the child is used to.  I also think that it would be a good idea to meet with the family before the start date and ask them to share with us things about living in Albania.  We could also have the family meet with staff and our current families and even answer questions if they are open to that idea.  These things would help us to learn as much as possible about this family before we started to try to provide services to them.  I would then take everything that we learned and try to integrate the same types of things into our current program.  I would try to find way to include pictures, objects, toys, foods, languages, and music from Albania in order to try to make the family feel at ease and to teach everyone in our program about our new family from Albania!

I think that these preparations will educated us in such a manner as to be able to provide the best services possible to this family.  I also think that it would teach us about how important it is to discover these things about all of our families... not just those from another country.  Just imagine if we worked this hard to find out these types of things about our current families!

     When I think of my life and instances in which I have experienced bias, oppression, discrimination, and other things of this nature, I automatically think of my childhood.  It seems like once I entered the school system, I became the target of these things, mainly because of the fact that I lived in extreme poverty.  Children always laughed at my clothing and would say that I probably didn't take baths.  They would make fun of my hand-me-down clothing and say things about me probably being on food stamps and welfare (which I was).  Adults were always giving me "the look" and I could always tell that they would prefer that their child never ask to have me over.  They wanted their child to be nice to me, but prayed that their child would never want to be my friend.  If everything ever came up missing, it was assumed that I took it (because I was poor).  These types of things were daily occurrences.
     Then I tried to think about times that I was discriminated against that had nothing to do with my socioeconomic status and I was reminded of an event that occurred when I was in the fifth or sixth grade.  I had been invited to a church event by a friend.  We were in the pastor's home waiting on his daughter, who was the youth group leader, to get ready.  We were sitting in the living room and had made a game of putting our feet up on their coffee table.  Any time that I would put my feet up on the table, one of the other girls would kick my feet off.  It started to get rough and a bit tense and finally one of the girls said, "you can't put your feet on this table unless you are a Christian."  I had never even heard of the word and really didn't understand what was going on... just that I was not included in this group of girls for some reason beyond my control.
   When I think of instances like this, I try to recall the feeling that I had during those times.  I felt embarrassed and ashamed, like I had done something wrong, but I really didn't know what it was.  I felt angry that I was mistreated for things that I had no control over.  I desperately wanted to belong, but just couldn't figure out what these other children wanted me to change in order to be part of their group.  I felt powerless.  I felt like the world was so unfair.
     I think that the only way to change these types of incidents is to change attitudes, assumptions, and values.  Children are socialized into treating others this way.  They are taught (whether intentionally or not) who belongs in the "in" groups and who does not.  In order to create greater equity for everyone, we have to change how we treat others and we have to change the messages that we send to our children about how others are to be treated.