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12. Communication and Design Skills
One of the outcomes of an impoverished arts and humanities curriculum can be a failure to develop effective communication skills. In the 1980s, when I was a lecturer at Edinburgh University, I assisted in the training of new faculty members in lecturing skills. Each course member began the course by giving a short mini-lecture which was then evaluated by the rest of the group. It was striking how bad the medical doctors often were in communicating their ideas. Weighed down with factual knowledge and steeped in cluttered medical terminology, they had little idea how to organize it or to make it accessible, and even less idea how to use visual aids, interpersonal skills, or variety in their approach (e.g., using anecdote, story, analogy) to engage the interest of an audience.
My experience of presentations by many Muslim speakers at conferences is that their mode of delivery can also lack expressiveness, modulation, nuance, subtlety, color, dramatic variety, visual support, and awareness of audience. Even “questions” asked from the conference floor can be lengthy, dry, inaudible monologues which show a peculiar lack of sensitivity to the needs and interests of the audience as a whole. Perhaps this can also be attributed to a lack of development in the arts and humanities. Such skills are developed as much through music, art, and aesthetics as through literary studies. Understanding of human psychology (e.g., perception) also plays a part in refining these skills.
The same can be said about design skills. Many Muslim publications are crudely presented, with a poor appreciation of the use of visual elements and design subtleties (including color, layout, and fonts) and how such visual elements engage interest and attention.
The best Islamic education needs to ensure that the curriculum gives opportunities for development of spoken communication and design skills. Students should be taught how to give spoken presentations within clear time limits and with visual support, and expressive speech can be developed through drama, reading aloud, and poetry composition and recitation. Story telling should be cultivated.
Students should also be taught how to chair meetings and conferences, how to elicit the opinions of others, how to motivate, encourage, and support others through praise, how to resolve conflicts and arguments, and other interpersonal skills which enhance communication and harmony.
It is vital, too, that students are taught how to use language as an instrument for building bridges rather than as a means of erecting walls. Many Muslims who have spoken publicly since the events of September 11 have come across as harsh, dogmatic, ranting, and uncompromising, and have unwittingly reinforced the Islamophobic stereotypes of Muslims which they seek to overturn. They fail to modulate their language according to the needs of their audience.
I am not suggesting that Islamic education should teach students to value the container over the contents, the jug over the water, and to value spin, presentation, and production values over substance and truth. I do not hold with the advice given by an eminent publicity consultant on one of television programs in the BBC Islam UK series screened in 2001 that Muslims should try to improve their image by getting more “celebrities” to represent Islam in the media. Muslims do not have to sell out to the celebrity culture. What I am saying is that people often cannot hear the truth if it is communicated in such a bald way that it arouses no sense of beauty; if it makes no allowance for the contemporary mindset; if it is conveyed only in granite—in heavily formulaic utterances and foreign terms which make no connection with our life experience; if it cannot recast ideas in fresh, modern language; and if it can only brow-beat and harangue rather than persuade. The Prophet said, “He dies not who gives life to learning.”
The curriculum needs to ensure that students learn how to use language to win friends through the Truth rather than make enemies; to persuade rather than repel; and to warm the heart.
There is also a pressing need to enhance communicative competence in written language, especially in the field of creative writing. Methods need to include the practice of non-literal and non-expository forms of conveying meaning, such as poetry, analogy, allegory, metaphor, illustrative story telling, and personal reflections. Expository writing could be improved through the practice of summarizing and paraphrasing skills, and the use of drafting and revising to elaborate and refine ideas and enhance structural coherence.
Next: Character and Ethical Values
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