This post is about Communication in the Field of Higher Education

Students (Apprentices) and Teachers (Masters of Education) live in two different worlds.

Are students today ready to go to Unis?

Why do they stay away from classes as much as possible?

This essay was inspired by some recent Media articles I read about failures in the Higher Education Process.

The Signal and the Thirst:

1st Chapter

Why Educational Communication Fails so often.

Introduction: The Noise Problem in Higher Education

In communication theory, noise represents any interference that distorts the intended message between sender and receiver. When we examine the persistent failure of communication between educators and students in higher education, we discover that the problem extends far beyond simple static on the line. The fundamental issue is not that our signals are unclear—it is that we have fundamentally misunderstood what constitutes successful communication in an educational context.

The ancient wisdom captured in the proverb “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink” reveals a truth we persistently ignore in academic discourse: transmission is not transformation. Information transfer is not learning. And herein lies the central paradox of contemporary higher education—we have become extraordinarily sophisticated at perfecting our signal while remaining largely oblivious to whether anyone is actually receiving it.

The Myth of Perfect Transmission

Our institutions operate on what might be called the “broadcast model” of education. We assume that if we can only make our lectures clearer, our syllabi more comprehensive, our presentations more polished, and our explanations more precise, learning will naturally follow. This represents a fundamental category error—the confusion of necessary conditions with sufficient conditions.

Consider the typical faculty development workshop. What do we focus on? Pedagogical techniques, presentation skills, curriculum design, assessment rubrics. All of these address the quality of the signal being transmitted. Rarely do we interrogate whether students are tuned to the right frequency, whether they possess the receiver capable of decoding our transmission, or most critically, whether they have any motivation to turn the receiver on in the first place.

This is our first major source of “noise”: frequency mismatch. Faculty broadcast in the language of abstraction, disciplinary conventions, and academic discourse. We speak in paradigms, theoretical frameworks, and methodological sophistication. Students, however, are often tuned to a different frequency entirely—one attuned to concrete examples, practical application, and immediate relevance. We transmit at 107.5 FM while they’re scanning the AM band.

The Three Forms of Educational Static

1. Cognitive Interference

The student’s mind is not a blank slate awaiting our inscriptions. It is a complex ecosystem of prior knowledge, misconceptions, cognitive frameworks, and mental models—some productive, many counterproductive. When we transmit new information, it must compete with and integrate into this existing structure.

Research in cognitive science consistently demonstrates that students filter new information through existing schemas. If those schemas are incompatible with what we’re teaching, our message doesn’t arrive corrupted—it arrives transformed into something we never intended. The student “hears” us, but what they receive bears little resemblance to what we transmitted. This is noise at its most insidious—the signal changes meaning in transit without anyone realizing it has occurred.

2. Affective Interference

Anxiety, self-doubt, stereotype threat, imposter syndrome, fear of failure—these emotional states function as powerful jamming signals that can completely overwhelm any educational content. A student in the grip of mathematics anxiety doesn’t simply struggle to understand calculus; the anxiety itself consumes the cognitive bandwidth required for processing new information.

We speak of “psychological safety” in learning environments, but we rarely acknowledge that its absence doesn’t just make learning harder—it makes communication fundamentally impossible. You cannot receive complex signals when your threat-detection systems are operating at maximum capacity.

3. Structural Interference

The architecture of higher education itself generates noise. Credit hours, grade point averages, degree requirements, career anxieties—these create a parallel signal that often drowns out the educational content entirely. Students become expert at decoding “What will be on the test?” while remaining deaf to “What does this mean?” The structural incentives of the system train students to optimize for performance metrics rather than genuine understanding.

2nd Chapter

The Horse, the Trough, and the Illusion of Control

The metaphor of leading a horse to water captures something essential about the limits of pedagogical power. We can control the quality of the water—we can ensure it’s pure, the right temperature, presented in an attractive vessel. We can position the trough perfectly. We can lead the horse with expertise and care. But the actual drinking? That remains forever beyond our control.

This is not a counsel of despair but a recognition of ontological reality: learning is an act of agency that can only be performed by the learner.

The horse must be thirsty. In educational terms, this is intrinsic motivation—the internal drive that cannot be manufactured from outside. We can create conditions that make thirst more likely, but we cannot inject it directly. Yet our institutions remain structured as if motivation were something we could administer in measured doses, like a pharmaceutical intervention.

The horse must recognize what’s in the trough as water—as something that satisfies thirst. Students must perceive what we’re offering as relevant, meaningful, and connected to their goals and identities. When the connection between our curriculum and their sense of purpose remains opaque, we shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t drink. They’re not being obstinate; they genuinely don’t recognize what we’re offering as the thing they need.

The horse must know how to drink—it must possess the physiological capability and learned behavior. Students arrive in our classrooms with wildly varying levels of metacognitive skill, self-regulation, and learning strategies. Some have never learned how to learn. We offer them water while assuming they already know how to drink, then express frustration when they fail to do so.

The Paradigm Shift: From Transmission to Transaction

If we take this analysis seriously, it demands a fundamental reorientation of how we conceptualize our work as educators. The question shifts from “How can I make my explanation clearer?” to “How can I cultivate thirst, recognition, and capability?”

Cultivating thirst means designing educational experiences that connect to intrinsic motivation. This is not about entertainment or pandering—it’s about helping students discover genuine intellectual curiosity and connecting disciplinary knowledge to questions they actually care about. It requires us to spend less time perfecting our lectures and more time understanding what animates the students before us.

Creating recognition means making the relevance and meaning of our disciplines transparent. We cannot assume students will spontaneously perceive why Renaissance poetry, organic chemistry, or statistical methods matter. We must build explicit bridges between disciplinary knowledge and students’ lived experiences, aspirations, and questions about the world. This is not dumbing down—it’s translation.

Developing capability means explicitly teaching the learning process itself. Metacognition, self-regulated learning, intellectual humility, productive failure—these aren’t soft skills to be picked up incidentally. They are the fundamental equipment required to benefit from higher education, and we must teach them as deliberately as we teach our content.

Reimagining Communication as Invitation

Successful educational communication is not broadcast—it is invitation. We invite students into a conversation, a disciplinary community, a way of seeing the world. Invitations can be declined. They require the invited party to choose to attend, to participate, to engage.

This reframing has profound implications. It means:

• Accepting that non-learning is always a possibility. Our job is to make the invitation as compelling as possible, but we cannot force acceptance.
• Recognizing that students are agents, not receivers. They are not passive endpoints in a transmission chain but active participants who co-create the educational experience.
• Understanding that our expertise in our discipline does not automatically confer expertise in motivating, connecting with, or understanding our students. These are separate skills that require separate cultivation.
• Acknowledging that the student who doesn’t learn has not necessarily failed—the instructional design may have failed them. When the horse doesn’t drink, we should interrogate the thirst, the trough, and the water before blaming the horse.

Conclusion: Beyond the Broadcast Model

The persistent failure of educational communication stems from our stubborn allegiance to a transmission model that was always inadequate to the task. We perfect our signals while ignoring whether anyone is listening, whether they can decode what they hear, or whether they have any reason to care.

The path forward requires intellectual humility. We must acknowledge that our disciplinary expertise, our pedagogical sophistication, and our institutional prestige do not guarantee learning. We must shift from asking “How can I teach this better?” to asking “What prevents students from learning this, and how can I address those barriers?”

We must lead the horse to water—this remains essential. But we must also recognize that our work doesn’t end there. We must cultivate thirst. We must help the horse recognize water when it sees it. We must ensure the horse knows how to drink. And ultimately, we must accept that the horse must choose to drink on its own.

This is not a diminishment of our role but a more accurate understanding of it. We are not transmitters but cultivators, not broadcasters but inviters, not information-delivery systems but architects of environments where learning becomes possible.

The question is not whether we can eliminate all noise from the educational signal—we cannot. The question is whether we can stop mistaking the clarity of our transmission for the success of communication itself. Until we do, we will continue to speak into the void, puzzled by the silence that greets even our most eloquent lectures, wondering why the horse refuses such obviously good water.

The horse will drink when it is thirsty, when it recognizes water, and when it knows how. Our task is to understand what creates each of these conditions—and to accept that creating conditions is not the same as controlling outcomes. This is the wisdom we must embrace if educational communication is to become something more than noise.

And now comes the test by eating the pudding:

3rd Chapter

Preparing Year 13 Students for “No Witchcraft for Sale” by Doris Lessing

(German Course System)

Pre-Reading: Cultivating Thirst

1. Personal Entry Points (Making them thirsty)

Begin with questions that connect to their lived experience:

• “Have you ever possessed knowledge that someone else wanted from you? How did it feel when they assumed they had a right to it?”
• “When has someone from outside your family/community misunderstood something important about your culture or values?”
• “What’s something valuable that can’t be bought or sold?”

These aren’t academic questions—they’re identity questions that tap into real experiences of power, ownership, and cultural boundaries.

2. The Stakes (Why this water matters)

Make explicit why this story matters now:

• Frame it around contemporary debates: intellectual property rights of Indigenous knowledge (COVID vaccines, traditional medicines)
• Connect to their German context: What does post-colonial literature reveal about power dynamics still operating today?
• University preparation angle: “This story exemplifies the kind of text where the real meaning sits beneath the surface—exactly what you’ll need to decode at university”

During Reading: Teaching Them How to Drink

3. Equip Them with Tools (The “how to drink” part)

Don’t just assign the reading—teach the process:

Close reading protocol:

• “Mark three moments where you feel uncomfortable or confused—that discomfort is data”
• “Track every moment Gideon says ‘no’ or resists—what’s the pattern?”
• “Notice what the white characters assume vs. what actually happens”

Perspective mapping:
Create a simple tool: “After each scene, write one sentence from Gideon’s perspective, one from Mrs. Farquar’s, one from your own”

4. Create Genuine Inquiry (Not fake questions)

Instead of “What is the theme?” ask questions you don’t have a pat answer for:

• “Is Gideon being generous or withholding? Can he be both? What does that tension tell us?”
• “The Farquars genuinely love Gideon and Teddy. Does that make their colonialism better or worse? Why?”
• “What would you do with the knowledge if you were Gideon?”

These are real questions with multiple defensible answers—the kind that require genuine thinking, not regurgitation.

Post-Reading: Making Recognition Possible

5. Connect to Their Future (Recognition of relevance)

For university preparation:

• “This is exactly how literary analysis works at university—there’s no ‘right answer’ in the back of the book. There’s only evidence and argument.”
• “Notice how Lessing never tells you what to think? University texts won’t either. You have to construct meaning.”

For intellectual development:

• “This story is about who gets to know what, and why. That’s not just a literature question—it’s a question about every field of study. Who owns knowledge?”

6. Agency-Building Activities

Give them choices that require ownership:

Option A: Write from Gideon’s perspective: a letter he never sent to the Farquars explaining why he wouldn’t share the medicine.

Option B: Research one real case of indigenous knowledge and pharmaceutical companies—how does Lessing’s fictional story illuminate real issues?

Option C: Create a contemporary parallel story set in Germany today—where do we see similar dynamics of power, knowledge, and cultural misunderstanding?

The key: They choose based on what genuinely interests them.

The Meta-Conversation (Essential!)

7. Make the Learning Process Transparent

At some point, explicitly say:

“Here’s what I’m not doing: I’m not giving you a lecture on the ‘correct interpretation.’ Here’s what I am doing: I’m asking you to become active meaning-makers. At university, no one will tell you what to think. You’ll need to develop your own interpretations and defend them with evidence. We’re practicing that now.”

This metacognitive framing helps them recognize why you’re teaching this way—it makes the pedagogical strategy visible.

Practical Session Structure

Session 1 (Before reading):

• 15 min: Personal connection questions (small groups)
• 10 min: Contemporary relevance—show them a 2-minute news clip about indigenous knowledge rights
• 10 min: Introduce close reading tools, model with opening paragraph
• 5 min: “Your task: read with these questions in mind…” (give them the inquiry questions)

Session 2 (After reading):

• 20 min: Small group discussion using their annotations—“Share one moment of discomfort and why”
• 15 min: Whole class mapping: “What does Gideon want vs. what do the Farquars want?” (make power dynamics visible)
• 10 min: “Now, here’s the university-level question…” (introduce the genuinely complex interpretive question)
• 5 min: Preview their choice assignment

Session 3 (Deep analysis):

• Student-led: They bring their interpretations, you facilitate debate
• Your role: “What’s your evidence?” “How would you respond to the opposite view?” “What are you assuming here?”

The Critical Shift

What NOT to do:

• ❌ Lecture on post-colonial theory first (kills intrinsic motivation)
• ❌ Give them study questions with obvious answers
• ❌ Assume they should naturally “appreciate” this text
• ❌ Focus on biographical details about Lessing before they care

What TO do:

• ✅ Start with their experience, then show how the text illuminates it
• ✅ Make the skills of literary analysis explicit and teachable
• ✅ Give them genuine intellectual problems, not puzzles with predetermined solutions
• ✅ Trust them to construct meaning, then push them to defend it with evidence

The Thirst-Recognition-Capability Framework Applied:

Thirst: Personal connection questions + contemporary relevance = motivation to engage

Recognition: Explicit university-prep framing + “these are real questions about power and knowledge” = they see why it matters

Capability: Close reading tools + metacognitive transparency + choice in response = they learn how to do literary analysis

Final Thought

The students who arrive at university unprepared aren’t those who haven’t read enough classics—they’re those who’ve never been taught to engage actively with texts as agents of their own meaning-making. Your job isn’t to make them understand your interpretation of Lessing. It’s to make them capable of developing and defending their own interpretations.

Lead them to this text. Show them why the water matters. Teach them how to drink. Then step back and let them drink on their own.

That’s university preparation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Published by Author and Blogger Peter Hanns Bloecker, retired Director of Education living at the Gold Coast in Queensland Australia since 2015.

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Updated Mon 20 Oct 2025 at 13:12pm local time.