Educational Interpreting: Developing Standards of Practice

Melanie Metzger and Earl Fleetwood

Although circumstances surrounding the advent of educational signed language interpreting are well documented, the goals and processes defining the practice are not. Since its inception, educational interpreting has taken on a “try everything” approach, resulting in a practice that is highly unstable with respect to the nature and scope of its responsibilities and, consequently, the outcomes it yields for deaf and hard of hearing students (Fleetwood 1995). A variety of communication “methods,” an acquiescent and vacillating role, and inconsistency with respect to goals and processes have come to define the practice of educational signed language interpreting (see Stuckless, Avery, and Hurwitz 1989; Ritten-house, Rahn, and Morreau 1989). Furthermore, efforts to codify educational interpreting are founded in descriptive rather than prescriptive processes. That is, some of the first important attempts to gather data and describe current practices in the field of educational interpreting (compare Stuckless, Avery, and Hurwitz 1989; Seal 1998) have been transformed into curricula and even testing mechanisms, without research with respect to the effectiveness of the practices that have been described. Efforts such as these serve to denote and promulgate a profession without its viability ever having been demonstrated. In fact, evidence suggests that educational signed language interpreting practices are, at best, restrictive with respect to the education of deaf and hard of hearing children (Winston 1992, 1994; Metzger 1992; Patrie 1993; Fleetwood 1995). The findings in Brown Kurz and Caldwell Langer (see chapter 1) serve to reflect this lack of standards from the consumer’s perspective.

The need to establish functional standards for individuals who serve as educational signed language interpreters is undeniable. As with any profession, the establishment of these standards is an essential precondition to ensuring the existence of an effective and efficient service. Without a clear understanding of what a profession intends to support, the profession’s viability cannot be measured, and consequently, the profession cannot be held accountable. For example, if it is not clear whether an educational interpreter is hired to ensure successful student learning or to foster equal opportunity in mainstream education (including the opportunity to fail and learn from that experience), then it is not clear whether an academically failing student falls short despite competent, well-implemented educational interpreting services or because those services are inadequate.

In light of past and current practices and as participants begin to establish an appropriate professional direction for the field of educational signed language interpreting, educational interpreters would need to identify their raison d’être and, subsequently, identify what professional behaviors support or interfere with it. The following five steps are recommended to accomplish this effort: (a) identify the purpose for which the job exists; (b) define standards of practice that identify job boundaries; (c) identify that corpus of knowledge and skills necessary for an individual to practice; (d) develop programs and materials that teach the identified corpus of knowledge and skills; and (e) develop a formal testing mechanism (Fleetwood 1995). These steps are further described in the following sections.

IDENTIFY THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH THE JOB EXISTS

The job of “educational interpreter” was not created as a result of, and should not be defined by, the needs of teachers, administrators, or other school personnel. The educational interpreter’s job exists because of the needs of deaf and hard of hearing students who find themselves needing to access education in hearing-mainstream classrooms. Nevertheless, many interpreters, teachers, and students do not share an understanding of the interpreter’s functional goal (Mertens 1990, Hayes 1992; Taylor and Elliot 1994). Further, many job descriptions highlight “noninterpreting tasks” that actually interfere with an interpreter’s time and ability to provide services that support desirable student outcomes (Stuckless, Avery, and Hurwitz 1989; Hayes 1992; Jones 1993; Fleetwood 1995). For example, for an interpreter to effectively interpret the wide variety of subjects that arise in K–12 and postsecondary settings, a tremendous amount of preparation is required. The preparation time an interpreter should have for tasks such as previewing upcoming lessons and educational videos is, instead, often devoted to noninterpreting tasks such as “grading papers, making bulletin boards and disciplining students—tasks much like those of a teacher’s aide” (Hayes 1992, 12; see also Brown Kurz and Caldwell Langer in chapter 1).

Paramount to the interpreter’s ability to provide services that support desirable deaf and hard of hearing student outcomes is that interpreter’s understanding of the purpose for which the job exists. The purpose of the job might be thought of in terms of what outcomes educational interpreting is intended to foster. Research that links interpreter attributes with deaf and hard of hearing student outcomes would seem desirable. For example, Seal (1998) seeks to find relationships between the success of the deaf student who uses interpreting services and certain attributes of the student and the interpreter that might affect that success. However, in terms of deaf student outcomes where educational interpreters are employed, “success” remains undefined. In other words, data collected are often the product of idiosyncratic opinions about what constitutes success without success being qualified or quantified as a clearly articulated benchmark.

Questions about job boundaries also arise daily in the multitude of decisions that confront an interpreter. This is because, in every instance, an interpreter must determine what level of information should be conveyed and how it should be presented. Interpreters navigate the reality that their decisions produce either more literal or more idiomatic renderings that frame any subsequent interaction. For example, an interpreter confronted with the following sentence must first determine whether a teacher is offering the student an option or is expecting immediate compliance: “Would you like to give me your homework now?”

Answers to other questions also serve to define the interpreter’s job. For example, should an interpreter attempt to include a speaker’s or signer’s accent or dialect? What if the interpreter is Euro-American and the student is African American? Interpreters must be knowledgeable about and be able to appropriately function in a multicultural environment (Lewis 1997).

The implications of interpreters’ decisions are not always direct or obvious. For example, during classroom discussion, should the interpreter indicate the source of a comment by doing something other than simple pointing? This question goes to the point that students in a Deaf class, like hearing students in a hearing class, have an equal opportunity to evaluate which peers would make good friends or who might be a good study partner.¹ Students make these evaluations, in part, through opportunities to observe who contributes and what they contribute to class discussions. Thus, to provide an inclusive experience that allows for this type of socialization, an interpreter not only must interpret what people say or sign but also must be sure that the identity of the source of every utterance is accessible (see Metzger, Fleetwood, and Collins, forthcoming, for a discussion of source attribution by interpreters). Brown Kurz and Caldwell Langer (see chapter 1) give evidence of students’ reactions to interpreter decisions; interestingly, neither the students nor most interpreters have a sense of what “should” be. This unclear purpose reflects the lack of standards and definition in the job. The examples above represent some of the questions and professional decisions that an educational interpreter must face. These kinds of decisions can be made well and consistently only when interpreters work toward a clearly identified goal.

DEFINE STANDARDS OF PRACTICE THAT IDENTIFY JOB BOUNDARIES

A profession is defined not only in terms of its attention to explicitly identified obligatory behaviors but also by its ability to recognize the significance of exclusive behaviors. In other words, that which lies outside the domain of a profession’s obligations is as important to defining the profession as that which lies within.

Teachers and other professionals enjoy job boundaries that have been established through years of experience and exposure. Professionals earn the right to practice by successfully completing degree programs that have been shaped by these boundaries and that prepare them to work in their particular job. Furthermore, a wide audience has come to have expectations of the professional that are consistent with the profession’s goals. Even so, teachers, for example, might be asked to take on responsibilities that, although related to the school, still reduce the time they have to devote to the teaching task. Nevertheless, one would rarely expect a teacher to leave a class unattended for three hours to prepare and serve lunch in the cafeteria. No matter how important it is for students to eat and to be healthy so they can learn, the fact is widely known and accepted that asking a teacher to prepare and serve lunch would interfere with his or her ability to perform the job for which he or she was hired. Three-hour lunch preparations during class time are outside the domain of the teaching profession in most schools.

Unfortunately, the domain of an educational interpreter is not as well known. Neither experience nor exposure to educational interpreters is commonplace among hearing students, teachers, or administrators. Furthermore, educational interpreters do not enjoy goal-driven, prescriptive professional standards. Thus, interpreters are commonly asked to perform tasks that interfere with their ability to provide students with services that support specific and desirable student outcomes. For example, an interpreter striving for inclusion of deaf and hard of hearing students in a hearing-mainstream context must articulate the socialization aspects of the educational environment. To omit accessibility to social behavior is clearly an exclusive practice. Yet, the only way to encourage hearing and deaf students to be willing to interact through an interpreter is to ensure that these students can trust the interpreter. Asking an interpreter to discipline students tends to have the opposite effect; it likely ensures that students will not trust the interpreter to maintain the confidentiality that they experience when an interpreter is not present (Fleetwood and Metzger 1990). Thus, expecting interpreters to discipline students is counter to the inclusion of deaf and hard of hearing students in mainstream settings. Similarly, asking interpreters to report behavior and study problems in an interpreted environment often runs counter to their efforts to build trust with students.

IDENTIFY THAT CORPUS OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS NECESSARY FOR AN INDIVIDUAL TO PRACTICE

When the goals of educational interpreting have been explicitly identified and after subsequent functional standards supporting those goals have been delineated, then the next relevant step is to identify the requisite knowledge and skills. To be meaningful, this body of required knowledge and skills must enable those in the profession to realize the profession’s identified functional standards. The importance of improving the quality and relevance of educational interpreter knowledge and skills cannot be overemphasized (Jones 1993; Patrie 1993; Winston 1994; Fleetwood 1995).

Winston (1992, 1994) points out that many activities in a predominantly hearing public school require that hearing students use both their ears and eyes to accomplish a given task. These tasks include, but are not limited to, video or film quizzes, assignment instructions, lectures with note-taking, and interactive verbal games in foreign language classes. An interpreter who will be working in educational settings must learn how to identify what activities require special attention and what strategies, if any, can make these activities accessible to someone who is using only his or her eyes to accomplish what hearing classmates approach as both an acoustic and a visual task. The interpreter not only must have the skill to accomplish the aforementioned task but also must recognize the inequity to affect its resolve. In addition, and perhaps more obviously, an educational interpreter must have the linguistic skills and ability to comprehend a wide variety of subjects if he or she is to accurately interpret them.

As Seleskovich (1978) and others have pointed out, interpreters cannot interpret what they do not understand. Thus, an educational interpreter must be able to both comprehend and construct utterances in two languages or modes (English and ASL, speaking and signing) regardless of whether the topic is history, mathematics, science, athletics, or language arts. For example, an interpretation of a volleyball unit requires that the interpreter be familiar with not only the rules for reporting scores in English—in which linear ordering indicates which score goes with which team—but also in ASL—in which spatial ordering serves a similar function. Only with communicative competence in both of the languages and in all of the subjects being interpreted can the interpreter then render a competently crafted interpretation. In this example, the interpreter must reserve the score-keeping conventions of the game in accordance with how those conventions are represented in two languages and modes. Exactly this sort of sociocultural linguistic information, which can arise in each subject and class, allows a student to be either included or excluded from the mainstream and peer interaction as well as from the learning process itself.

Research in this area must focus on determining not only what body of knowledge and skills is required of the job but also whether it exists and can be learned. Ultimately, this research will determine the viability of educational signed language interpreting.

DEVELOP PROGRAMS AND MATERIALS THAT TEACH THE IDENTIFIED CORPUS OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

If research determines that knowledge and skills requisite of educational interpreting exist and can be learned, then a meaningful course of study can be established to teach them. Currently, programs that prepare future educational interpreters include the teaching of skills such as materials preparation and how to tutor. Presumably, these tasks are already covered by other members of the educational team. Omitting them from time-constrained educational interpreter preparation programs would allow more time for interpreters to acquire the knowledge and skills needed for the interpreting task itself.

DEVELOP A FORMAL TESTING MECHANISM

An effective testing mechanism is one that is based on the purpose of the job, the standards of practice that delimit the job, and the corpus of relevant knowledge and skills. Tests that provide a measure for various aspects of knowledge and skills could be beneficial. For example, an interpreter who passes a Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) in any of the languages in which he or she will be interpreting has demonstrated some of the skills and knowledge related to the interpreting job. However, a test measuring competence in spoken language interpreting or in teaching, or for any adjunct area does not measure an individual’s ability to work effectively as an educational signed language interpreter. Only a test that measures all aspects of the job, and only tests that measure the skills and knowledge specific to that job, can help determine who is qualified to support desired deaf and hard of hearing student outcomes. Because no clear goals have yet been identified for educational signed language interpreters, no test currently exists that measures an individual’s competence at providing students with an inclusive, interpreted education. The Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment (EIPA), discussed in other chapters of this volume, provides an assessment of interpreting skills related to the message itself. The Educational Interpreter Knowledge Assessment (EIKA) is being developed to assess knowledge; there is still no assessment for decision-making skills and other essential skills required of an interpreter.

Signed language interpreting in educational settings is a relatively young field. At this point in its evolution, the profession has yet to identify either the outcomes it strives to support or the functional role that will achieve these ends. Identifying the goal of the practitioner with respect to deaf and hard of hearing student outcomes can allow a meaningful educational interpreting methodology to be constructed. Subsequently, pursuing this goal will ultimately answer questions of viability with respect to educational signed language interpreting as a productive practice.

NOTE

1. In this chapter, we follow the convention of using deaf to refer to audiological status and Deaf to refer to cultural membership in a Deaf community.

REFERENCES

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Fleetwood, E., and M. Metzger. 1990. Cued Speech transliteration: Theory and application. Silver Spring, Md.: Calliope Press.

Hayes, L. 1992. Educational interpreters for deaf students: Their responsibilities, problems, and concerns. Journal of Interpretation 5(1): 5–24.

Jones, B. 1993. Responsibilities of educational sign language interpreters in K–12 public schools in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

Lewis, J. 1997. The issue of cultural competence: An ethical dilemma or bye bye bi-bi. RID Views 14(6): 5.

Mertens, D. 1990. Teachers working with interpreters: The deaf student’s educational experience. American Annals of the Deaf 136:48–52.

Metzger, M. 1992. Cued Speech transliterating: The sign of success in a mainstream classroom. In The Cued Speech resource book for parents of deaf children, eds. O. Cornett and M. E. Daisy, 684–91. Raleigh, N.C.: National Cued Speech Association.

Metzger, M., E. Fleetwood, and S. Collins. Forthcoming. Discourse genre and linguistic mode: Interpreter influences in visual and tactile interpreted interaction. Sign Language Studies 4(2): 118–37.

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Rittenhouse, R., C. Rahn, and L. Morreau 1989. Educational interpreter services for hearing-impaired students: Provider and consumer disagreements. Journal of the American Deafness and Rehabilitation Association 22:57–63.

Seal, B. 1998. Best practices in educational interpreting. Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon.

Seleskovitch, D. 1978. Interpreting for international conferences. Washington, D.C.: Pen and Booth.

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Taylor, C., and R. Elliot. 1994. Identifying areas of competence needed by educational interpreters. Sign Language Studies 83:179.

Winston, E. A. 1992. Mainstream interpreting: An analysis of the task. In The challenge of the ’90s: New standards in interpreter education. Proceedings of the eighth national convention of the Conference of Interpreter Trainers, ed. L. Swabey, 51–67. Pomona, Calif: Conference of Interpreter Trainers.

———. 1994. An interpreted education: Inclusion or exclusion. In Implications and complications for deaf students of the full inclusion movement, eds. C. Johnson and O. Cohen, 55–62. Gallaudet Research Institute Occasional Paper 94-2. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet Research Institute, Gallaudet University.