Communication Barriers Faced by Tribal Students in Tertiary Education

Abstract

Communication is at the centre of almost all the activities that take place in our daily lives. Effective communication in education is very important in order to ensure that students get optimum benefit out of the teaching-learning process. It is usually seen that sometimes due to certain psychological and socio-cultural constraints various barriers in communication arise. Prior studies inform us that these barriers are experienced more by the unprivileged and deprived communities of a society as compared to privileged and richer sections of a society relative to the privileged and richer sections. Tribal students constitute a major percentage of that marginalized and deprived section. The present study was conducted using a mixed-methods approach among tertiary level tribal students, college teachers and other staff members to analyse the aforesaid problems. The ‘shy, introvert and recluse group’ of tribal students in different colleges were observed to have been experiencing a plethora of problems in their learning process- the important ones being- reluctance to communicate properly with people other than their own close friends and acquaintances; a sense of being neglected by teachers, other non-tribal students, and even by the administrative staff. The thesis concludes by providing certain solutions to the issue at hand, as proposed by the troubled tribal students themselves, their teachers and other non-tribal students and staff members of the colleges concerned.