Page 167 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Pedagogy and Communication | 155

the joint activity, and the success of the joint activity will depend upon the
joint effort of accuracy of his insight into the pupil’s inner world.

Mechanism of Mutual Perception

Let us try to understand the mechanism of mutual perception. How can a
pedagogue and the student ‘construct’ an image of the other, or each other’s
inner world, from their external characteristics of behaviour? We shall answer
this question with the help of three mechanisms of interpersonal perception.
They are identification, reflection, and stereotyping.
Identification is a method of understanding another individual by con-
sciously or unconsciously identifying oneself with the other. During the pro-
cess of communication, we tend to make queries about the other person’s
inner state, intentions, thoughts, motives, and feelings by putting ourselves
in the other person’s position. But the subject of communication needs to
understand the other not only in an abstract manner, but to know how we
ourselves will be perceived and understood by the other person. The aware-
ness of the subject of an individual’s own image formed in the ‘other person’s’
mind is called reflection.
To sum up, reflection may be understood as to how in order to under-
stand the other person, we must be aware of our own attitudes, as well as that
of the person perceived. It is like a double mirror image; we see ourselves being
reflected in others’ perception. In the process of communication, identification,
and reflection comes out as a single whole as both of them are very important
in pedagogic communication in order to avoid casual attribution or casual
interpretation. An erroneous casual interpretation of a pupil’s behaviour by
the pedagogue will hamper the process of communication.

Stereotypes

Stereotyping is the classification of the forms of behaviour and their casual
interpretation, at times without any valid reason, by rating them with already
known or seemingly known phenomena matched with social stereotypes.
Stereotype in this sense is a fixed image of an individual used as a cliché. It may
be the result of generalization by the subject of interpersonal perception of his
personal experiences, and the knowledge based on such experience may not
only be doubtful, but also absolute nonsense. Unfortunately, our stereotypes
often form the standard for understanding other persons.

Prejudice and Subjectivity

In pedagogic communication, stereotypes on the part of the teacher would
lead to subjectivity. Unfortunately they are formed in the mind of the teacher
by the initial information he or she gets about a particular pupil, and this

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