Communication as Shared Interpretation

The aspect of miscommunication is something I deal with on an everyday basis as an English teacher. I share an office with two other lovely adjuncts and we use each other as a think-tank resource every single day. Something we often do is trade assignment sheets to make sure the language we're using is accessible to a large audience in terms of wording and presentation. The most basic sentences, can often be the most confusing to students.

The balance of what Walzer and Gross mention in Positivists, Postmodernists, Aristotelians, and the Challenger occurs in the three components discussed on pg. 20,

"reality, knowledge, and language."

I was particularly struck by the description of positivism described as, "naively premising a reality somehow understood as separate from human cognition that could be apprehended directly if the safeguards the scientific method provides against subjectivity and prejudice, politics and rhetoric, were honored."

In the eyes of most composition students language seems to be a flat plain: the assumption is that there is one answer, one "right" grade, and that their presumptions about a particular assignment description aren't necessarily wrong. But what often happens is that one or two words give way in the assignment sheet. In the very beginning of my teaching career I realized very quickly that I had to use language that was common and yet complex, full of examples that give way to the ability for language to be deciphered and promote individuality and creativity but to also appeal to students in a non-confusing way. Its something my officemates and I still work on all the time.

In the case of the challenger it seems as though the two viewpoints, engineer and managers, created a dichotomy of information. I wonder, if the language I use to express myself in an 'objective' manner in my assignment sheets carries the same kind of interpreted weight. For example, if a student was highly involved in engineering, would they have difficulties viewing this form of information because they have been specially trained to think of communication in different ways.

It all seems to come back to the aspect of middle ground: of thinking of knowledge and information in a way that attemps (though I don't quite understand how it could fully succeed in terms of mass audience comprehansion) to maintain a level of neutrality. This seems to also be a very politically charged issue in terms of choosing an audience to "write to".

I assume in my assignments that my students are on the same page with me in terms of comprehension of the given description. I in no way would ever think of this as "dumbing down" information but would think of it instead as attempting to find that ground of neutrality. Even still, as Winsor mentions, knowledge even in a factual statistical format has room for mass communication problems. Seeing communication as shared interpretation seems like an exhausting task. ha.

This description of communication makes me think of my use of description in a very interesting light. Something to possibly research further in terms of student teacher communication styles...