Realizations of a Communication Practioner

The article about Aling Seping and Dr. Flavier as supporters and teachers on Family Planning says a lot about being a communication practitioner. As a Communication Arts student for years, I have encountered many things that are necessary to have an effective communication with people around us. These things are also what Dr. Flavier did to educate the barrio people.

After reading the article, I've realized that communication practitioners must be knowledgeable enough on different matters. We don't discuss only one thing, we have to be versatile. Even if it's not our field of interest, we have to take time in feeding our brain with various sources of knowledge. If we don't know anything, we can not communicate in the first place. Learning is an unending process. We, as communicators, must love learning as much as we love communicating. We're just so lucky because by communicating, we also learn whether by chance, or by choice.

One of the good reasons of communication is to minimize misunderstanding and misconception. But of course, we can not do this if we do not show what reality is. We must know the proper method of removing incorrect interpretations from the minds of the people who are not well-educated. We have to establish what we really wan them to know. We should not just bombard them with new facts, instead, we should facilitate their learning gradually. As what the rural reconstruction motto says, “Start with what they know, build on what they have.”

As communication practitioners, we must prepare to interact with diverse groups of people. We're not expected to communicate to just one cultural group. We are obliged to communicate to different kinds of cultures in order to understand each of them. We have to open our minds to many other possibilities. We shouldn't be narrow-minded and judgmental. As quoted from the article, explaining “increased peristalsis in the Fallopian tubes and hastened ovum” is difficult when a person you are talking to is not exposed to the knowledge on medical terms. We have to bear in mind that human beings come from various walks of life.