Coursera Assignment for Design Thinking Submission

1.  Challenge  I am an educator and I teach business communication at a polytechnic in my country. Usually  at the beginning of the semester, one of the key things to be taught is that of the Purpose- Audience-Context (PAC) components. Understanding the Purpose of the communication  situation, who the Audience is, and the dynamics of the relationship between speaker/writer  and listener/reader will determine the tone, register and content used. My students are 16-17  year-olds, who are fairly good in the English Language, but not necessarily communicatively  competent. I usually tell them that being good in a language, does not make them good  communicators. Herein lies the pedagogical challenge – how to get young students to  appreciate the PAC of communication so that they are sensitized to the requirements of a  communication context, and be more effective communicators.

2.  Selection  I teach across many schools in my institutions – Engineering, Design Arts, Engineering,  Business. My teaching approach is never a one-size-fits-all thing. I am given leeway to vary my  approach and in one semester, I decided to adopt a learning launch by experimenting a new  and creative method to teach PAC, and fine-tuning it if need be. Rather than leaving this PAC  at the theoretical level (just explaining the abstract concepts), I felt it was necessary to get an  experience of a simulated communication encounter. I would then get feedback from  students through their post-activity reflections on what they learnt while doing the activity.

3.  Application  For each class, I divided 20 students into 5 groups and assigned each group one of the  following communication challenges:  (i)  Explain the difference between RAM and hard-disk storage to a non-techy elderly  person

(ii)  Explain the offside rule in soccer to a person who is watching a game for the first  time

(iii)  Convince an anti-vaccination parent why his/her child should get vaccinated

(iv)  Convince a meat lover why his diet may be harming the environment

(v)  Explain “birth control” to a class of 10-year olds

Each group was given 30 minutes to research and think how best to carry out the task. A  group representative had to role-play and enact the actual encounter to the class acting as its  audience.    Subsequently, in later classes, I varied the scenarios a little to suit the disciplines of the  students’ diplomas. Not every group was able to adapt their communicative strategy correctly  to the right audience. For example, when a student had to role-play explaining techy concepts  to a non-techy senior citizen, he continued to use computer jargon – basically communicating  from his own perspective, rather than the audience’s perspective. My point in this approach  was not to have the students come up with the best communication strategy for each  situation, but for them to appreciate the intricacies of each situation, and the empathy  needed to understand the challenges on part of the audience to understand the intended  message.

The feedback from the post-activity reflection showed that many of them finally understood  that linguistic competence alone did not always lead to communication success. From the  reactions of the class, I also sensed a higher level of engagement and involvement in what  would otherwise have been a dry abstract lesson if this activity was omitted.

4.  Insight  By applying the learning launch in this pedagogical experiment, I had actually deviated from  the lesson objective of that Lesson 1 of the module which was to just introduce the objectives  and overview of the module. Through the first experiment, and checking on their students’  reactions and reflections from the activity, I felt I had moved from teaching them ABOUT  communication to showing them the communication process.  I also told my students after  the activity that I honestly did not think all of them was going to get it right (although a few  did brilliantly). Doing a learning launch requires a Growth Mindset, daring to try, and fail, and  re-trying again.

5.  Approach  An alternative approach could be to use the Visualisation Tool to develop a pedagogical  approach.  By getting educators to think in terms of the various possible communication  encounters (parent-child, seller-buyer, friend-friend, young-elderly) and come up with ways to  teach students extrapolation strategies in the communication encounters they find  themselves in, we will generate a form of visual thinking in our students.

