The University linked with a Santa Cruz community agency. This agency is a violence prevention agency that provides services directed at the Latino community. The University and the agency provided an after school program for mostly Spanish-speaking and bilingual children between the ages of three and twelve. The site is a computer lab designed to give the children the opportunity to use and become familiar with computers. As an undergraduate participating in this program, many questions arose for me concerning the role of nonverbal communication.
Nonverbal communication refers to a variety of forms of communication excluding language.
Every undergraduate in the program wrote field notes about their experience at the site. The field notes contained a description of events, as well as the undergraduates reactions to the events. The undergraduates posted their field notes on a confidential class web site. The field notes contain many examples of non-verbal communication. The most common examples in the field notes were pointing, moving the mouse, smiling, and silence.