For many years afterwards I was confronted daily with failures to communicate; I would say something expecting to be heard and understood but whatever I said was consistently ignored, rejected or considered a nuisance. I was asking ‘disturbing’ questions to my school teachers – I thought I was just enquiring about what they were teaching, to understand everything more deeply, my curiosity was insatiable… but my teachers deflected, deferred and deterred.
I felt an equal measure of defeat and persistence about this. There must be a way in which the other person can show me by their answers that they have heard me.
I became a school teacher, and found myself with children who had been abandoned by the educational system, rejected and sent to oblivion in an underground – literally – class. They were my first teachers. If I could communicate with them and they could communicate with me and if in the process we could learn something from each other, wouldn’t that be a start, like carving a new groove in the otherwise disappointing world of communication? It was arduous and challenging with many pitfalls but it did happen. It was my first time being the ‘adult’ in this exchange and I was determined to get there, to that fair and equal exchange of communication.
Because that’s where results come from. Once we could speak and hear each other, we could move forward and accomplish something. We were not stuck anymore; true communication, beyond our roles as teacher/pupil had unlocked the possibility of me teaching and them learning which previously had failed to happen time and time again.
Most educational systems impose a strict code of conduct when it comes to speaking in a school context, especially when it comes to the communication in the class and in between the teachers (adults) and the pupils (children). The children can chat all they want (or nearly) when outside the classroom and particularly outdoors, with their peers but their way of expressing themselves is seriously thwarted when inside the classroom. Do we still live in that world of ‘children not heard nor seen’? Can we experience respect from the students outside of this ‘code of conduct’? I believe we can without thwarting their self-expression. What was your experience like as a student?
To be continued…
