How Culture Shapes the Way We Communicate
- Louise Sommer
- Jan 26, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
At its best, communication in higher education is not efficiency. It is empathy, creativity, and culture in motion.
In my work as an educational psychologist and coach supporting university lecturers, I often see how communication is quietly doing much more than delivering content. It is shaping whether students feel included or excluded, whether learning feels alive or mechanical, and whether a lecture becomes a shared intellectual space or a one-way transfer of information.
And yet, many lecturers are rarely given the space to reflect on this deeper layer of their work.
They are expected to teach, assess, supervise, publish, respond, adapt, and manage increasingly diverse student cohorts. Often with limited time to pause and ask: How is my way of communicating shaping the learning experience?
Communication in Higher Education Is Never Neutral
I’ve come to believe that communication in university teaching is never neutral. It carries culture:
It carries assumptions about knowledge, authority, participation, and belonging. And it carries the invisible curriculum of higher education.
A lecture is not just a transmission of information. It is a cultural encounter between lecturer and students. Even across generational, linguistic, and cultural differences.
When lecturers speak, they are not only explaining concepts. They are also signalling:
who belongs in the room
what counts as “good thinking”
what kind of voice is valued
how safe it is to ask questions or be wrong
This is why two lecturers can teach the same content, but create completely different learning environments.
One feels open, curious, and engaging. The other feels rigid, distant, or overwhelming.
The difference is rarely content. The difference is communication shaped by culture.
The Role of Culture in How Lecturers Teach
Culture shapes how we interpret silence, questioning, disagreement, and participation.
In some academic cultures, silence is thinking. In others, it is disengagement. In some classrooms, students are expected to challenge ideas openly. In others, they are expected to listen and reflect quietly before speaking. For university lecturers working in increasingly internationalised classrooms, this becomes even more complex.
What looks like “lack of participation” may actually be deep processing shaped by cultural learning norms. And what looks like “confidence” may be cultural familiarity with academic debate.
This is where cultural awareness becomes pedagogical awareness. Not as an abstract concept, but as a daily teaching reality.
Lecturers are constantly navigating these subtle layers, often without naming them.
Creativity in Teaching Is Not Decoration, But It Is Clarity
In my work with higher education staff, creativity is often misunderstood as something extra.
Creativity is looked at as something you add when you have time. A visual slide. A new activity. Uacademic. A more engaging example.
But in reality, creativity in teaching is not decoration. It is clarity.
Creativity is how complex knowledge becomes accessible without becoming simplified. It is how abstract theory becomes something students can think with, not just memorise. And creativity is how a lecture becomes an experience of understanding, not just information delivery.
Sometimes creativity looks like reordering a concept so it finally “clicks” for students. Sometimes it is a story that anchors an abstract idea in lived experience. Sometimes it is silence, pacing, or a question that shifts the energy of a room.
Creativity is not separate from academic rigour. It is what allows rigour to be received.
Why Communication Is the Core of Academic Teaching
One of the most consistent themes I see across universities is this:
Lecturers are experts in their discipline, but rarely given structured space to reflect on how they communicate it.
Yet communication is the bridge between expertise and student understanding.vBetween curriculum and lived learning. Between knowing and learning. This is true whether you are teaching engineering, psychology, business, nursing, or the humanities.
Students do not only learn what we know, and they learn from us, how to relate and understand knowledge. And this is communicated through tone, structure, presence, and relational awareness.
When communication is rushed, overloaded, or overly abstract, students often disengage. Not because they lack ability, but because they lose the thread of meaning.
When communication is clear, human, and structured around understanding, students often rise far beyond expectations. Not because the content changed.
But because the relationship to learning changed.
The Intersection of Culture, Creativity, and Academic Communication
When culture, creativity, and communication come together in higher education, teaching becomes something very different; it becomes relational, embodied, and it becomes human. This mean lecturers are no longer just delivering content. They are shaping learning environments where students can think, question, struggle, and connect ideas across complexity.
This is especially important in today’s higher education landscape, where lecturers are working with:
increasingly diverse student cohorts
higher emotional and cognitive load
digital and blended learning environments
pressure for measurable outcomes and efficiency
It's important to mention, that in this context, communication is not a soft skill. It is a core pedagogical practice.
It's this practice that determines whether students feel like they are “keeping up” or actually learning. Whether they participate or withdraw. Whether they memorise or understand.
Communication Shapes Belonging in the Classroom
One of the most overlooked aspects of university teaching is how strongly communication shapes belonging which can be embodied via a simple phrase, a question, or even the way feedback is framed can shift a student’s sense of place in higher education.
Students often do not remember every concept they were taught.
But they remember:
whether they felt included
whether their contribution mattered
whether confusion was allowed
whether they felt spoken to or spoken at
This is where communication becomes more than delivery. It becomes pedagogy. And pedagogy becomes culture.
A Final Reflection for University Lecturers
At its best, communication in higher education is not efficiency, but:
It is the lived expression of how we understand learning, knowledge, and human development.
It is empathy in practice.
It is creativity in how complexity is made accessible.
It is culture shaping every interaction in the classroom.
As I often remind the lecturers I work with: students are not only learning your subject. They are learning how to think through the way you communicate it.
And that is where teaching becomes deeply human again.
I would love to hear your reflections on this topic. Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
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