As teachers, building trust and maintaining relationships is central to the work we do. However, this can be challenging in the current environment with 70% of communication taking place online, often asynchronously. On March 26th Sabrina Lucidi tackled this issue in her workshop on INVISIBLE BODY LANGUAGE.

Invisible body language refers to nonverbal communication, both when speaking and writing, specifically in an online or virtual environment. In the workshop we looked at how we can use invisible body language to express emotions, and how this in turn can affect relationships and connections, focusing on five areas in particular. 

  • Choice of communication channel to express urgency
  • Use of emoji, symbols and punctuation to express emotions
  • Response time and time of response to express respect
  • Choice of to, cc, bcc and reply all to express inclusion
  • Digital persona to express identity

 As teachers, I imagine we were all already aware of non verbal communication such as tone and register in written language, but the workshop presented several ideas participants may not have considered in this context. For example we considered the different meanings of the following responses to the chat message:

“Can you walk my dog tonight”

Response 1: Sure! | Response 2: Sure | Response 3: Sure… 

It turns out that we can express a lot with punctuation.

There were also activities in which we reflected on our own use of invisible body language and considered the difference between digital natives and adaptors and how our teaching can reflect this.

Overall, this was a workshop with a thought-provoking topic which provided a lot of opportunities for interaction between the participants. If you are interested, the slides are available for members on the EasyVerein platform.