Building Positive Relationships Through Communication
WATCH: from TEDMED, “Culture is Prevention” (18:14m), by Ursula Bauer of the Center for Disease Control in the United States.
Dr. Bauer is the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) Director, and she “talks in brief about how American Indians and Alaskan Natives have tenaciously sought to hold onto their identity, language, religion, culture and practices with varying degrees of success.”
Dr. Bauer is speaking to the American context, and while Canada is a quite different country and culture from the U.S., we also share significant similarities in the historical development of relationships between Canada’s political leadership and Indigenous peoples. Language plays an important role in her talk.
TASK:
Having listened to Dr. Bauer’s TEDMED talk, apply her thinking to the Canadian context. Do some basic and preliminary research into how Canadian medical systems deal with and treat First Nations people. Can you find examples of both successes and failures of communication between medical practitioners and First Nations people? When you find a specific example of a success or failure, fully analyse the situation in terms of communication. Why was this situation a success or failure? Be specific and give clear, focussed examples.
DO a basic FACED analysis of your chosen example, as per chap. 1.1 of the course e-textbook.
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialcomm/chapter/1-2-principles-of-problem-solving/
A note of caution about your research and choice of examples. Your first instincts will be to ‘google’ the idea, which is fine. Keep in mind, however, that the entire class is googling the same idea, so the odds of many people finding the same examples is high. Some people would do well to select examples that are not the most obvious.
Because this task is a discussion, which implies give and take, you are expected and required to respond meaningfully to one of your classmates. What is a meaningful response? To merely say something such as “I like that idea” or “That’s a good suggestion” is not a response that demonstrate direct and explicit engagement with another person’s ideas. Your goal is to identify an idea in one of your classmate’s discussions posts and then to expand on the idea with additional details or thoughts, or to debate an idea with a respectful counterpoint, or to show how an idea might be looked at from a different perspective, and so on. Your responses need substance of idea and thought.
