Loucine Hayes Offers Guidance on Ethical Communication in the AUK Library

Under the leadership of Gulan Ahmed, the Library at the American University of Kurdistan (AUK) offers training sessions and workshops roughly weekly. It therefore functions as a center of education within a center of education. On February 21, it hosted a workshop conducted by Loucine Hayes, Director of the Center for Academic and Professional Advancement (CAPA) at AUK. The topic was one that Mrs. Hayes, in view of her current directorial role with CAPA and her past successful experiences with NGOs across multiple continents, could speak on authoritatively: “Ethical Communication.”

Mrs. Hayes is a multilingual, multi-talented individual, and she channeled her rich life experiences and diverse set of skills into a talk that would be particularly relevant to those of university age looking to make the leap into the world of work – or having just made that leap and in need of a little guidance to ease the transition. The description of the talk put out by the AUK Library in advertising the event so aptly captures what it ended up being about that it bears repeating here:

“This workshop will explore ethical communication in academic settings, with a focus on best practices for communicating professionally with professors and peers. Participants will learn strategies for maintaining integrity and respect in their academic interactions, as well as practical tips for ethical communication in personal and professional contexts.”

“Ethics” is inherently philosophical, and Mrs. Hayes approached it as such. The philosopher Socrates was famed for his question-driven “Socratic method,” and Mrs. Hayes framed her own talk with three philosophical queries: “Who is teaching us what is ethical?”; “What is right and what is wrong?”; and “What is fair?” She examined these weighty questions with extensive audience interaction, so as to be sure the listeners were grappling with the issues themselves. In another technique sure to convince the audience that what they were discussing was relevant to them, she explicitly connected “ethics” to the both the AUK Mission, which calls for “ethical community service” and “respect for inclusion and diversity,” and the AUK Vision, aiming for the “highest caliber of academic research” that even a small lapse in ethics could compromise.

In matters of morals, people routinely speak of a “compass” guiding them. Mrs. Hayes explicitly defined a “compass of ethical communication” and named its four cardinal directions: kindness, responsibility, humility, and courage. She elicited definitions and examples of the four qualities from the audience, e.g., “courage” as “daring to be different.” She returned to her earlier tactic of approaching ethics through a series of questions, encouraging everyone to ask themselves in considering some course of action: “Is this kind?”; “Am I being responsible?”; “Am I being humble?”; and “Am I showing courage?”

She closed with a fitting “final examination” for ethics, hypothetical situations. All of her hypotheticals have the potential to happen at AUK every day. The audience members, after vigorously speaking among themselves, gave reasoned responses to their scenarios. The ultimate indication that they had learned and enjoyed themselves during the “Ethical Communication” workshop came when they asked Loucine Hayes for a follow-up session.