I recently saw a presentation about how culture shock affects foreign students, both on their arrival in their host country and upon their return home. The presentation was very well done. The speaker had prepared thoroughly and had clearly put a lot of effort into creating her visual aids.
Rather than using PowerPoint, she had a large paper chart of the most common pattern that many foreign students or immigrants go through. From the idyllic honeymoon phase, when everything is new and wonderful, to hating everything about the place to, finally, an acceptance of both the good and the bad of the host country, or their own. And as a nearly twenty-year resident of Japan, a very alien culture to my own, I can say she was right on the money.
She also had lists of the symptoms of cultural dislocation and ways to mitigate the most negative aspects, also on paper. Each was well printed, in a large legible font and presented with flair and professionalism. And yet, I was disappointed.
I couldn’t help but feel that, in presenting and explaining her visual aids so well, she had missed an opportunity to really connect with her audience. Not only did the charts and their data dominate the structure of her talk, they also often pulled her attention away from the audience, as she turned to point to an item on a list or chart.
But beyond that, letting the charts and lists drive the presentation took her focus away from what should have been its heart; stories. For this was a presentation about people, about the ebb and flow of emotion. Abstract nouns, like integration and disintegration, simply couldn’t convey the feeling of being adrift in an alien land, without the touchstones and comforts of home.
How much more powerful could it have been, if she had presented naked, with no charts or lists, if she had brought nothing to the audience but stories of people, once lost and alone in a strange land, who had found their way to a rich and rewarding experience.
At the very least, stories could have been dropped into her talk to illustrate each of the points she was making far better than a chart could, without even changing the structure or content of the rest of her presentation.
For as good as her presentation was, that’s the presentation I would rather have heard. That’s the presentation that would have really hit home.
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