I think the idea of meeting minds is fanciful. Either alien life will be to us like the green slime on a pond, or to them we will be like the green slime on a pond. One will learn nothing from the other.
Pretty sure if they can make it all the way here, at minimum we can figure out some rudimentary glyphs on pencil & paper, along with non-verbal movements.
That assumes they have a sense of sight similar to our own. What if their only well developed sense is smell; their equivalent of writing is depositing scent onto paper and their "non-verbal" movements were the movements required to produce, project, and receive, scent? How would we "look" to them? What is to say that they share any senses with us?