More Than Meets the Eye: Revealing the Complexities of an Interpreted Education

Chapter 3. Examining the Work of Interpreters Through Multiple Lenses

26 Chapter 3 Examining the Work of Interpreters Through Multiple Lenses In order to discover what interpreters do and what factors influence their decisions, I investigated the practices and decisions of interpreters working in K–12 settings, including their roles and responsibilities, the strategies they employed, their rationale for choosing particular courses of action, and the ways in which they responded to the complexities of the teaching and learning environment. In other words, I sought to find out what educational interpreters do and why. Rather than merely asking interpreters whether or not they were certified and the extent to which they felt prepared for their current responsibilities as educational interpreters, I examined what they did and the factors that informed their decisions from multiple perspectives. Observations in the field and video of educational interpreters at work provided data about what interpreters actually do throughout the day. In addition, because making sense of interpreters’ actual practice requires an understanding of their own perceptions of the interpreting task and primary obligations at any given moment across various sets of situated realities, recorded interviews provided a venue for interpreters to explain the approaches and strategies they used to make decisions while working in K–12 contexts. Eliciting interpreters’ own narrative voices while they watched video of themselves at work similarly illuminated the rationale behind their choices. Furthermore, video of interpreters at work and recorded interview data allowed for iterative analysis of what interpreters actually do and what factors inform their decisions about what to do. My own expertise as an interpreter, interpreter educator, and educational researcher allowed me to provide insights from additional perspectives. As an interpreter, I thought about what I might do in the moment, if I were interpreting. As a teacher, I wondered how best to equip my students for work in educational contexts. As a researcher, I gained interesting insights by observing intently and thinking critically Examining the Work of Interpreters : 27 about the data gathered. To capture the complexities of interpreting in educational contexts, the study design provided multiple lenses through which to investigate the work and practice of K–12 interpreters. The following questions framed the description and analysis of the data: 1. What do interpreters do in the course of their daily work in K–12 classrooms? 2. What factors influence the moment-to-moment decisions of K–12 interpreters? The study described in this volume not only highlights what interpreters do in K–12 classrooms, it also gives educational interpreters a voice through which they can teach us how they make decisions in the course of their work. SELECTION OF GRADE LEVEL, SCHOOL SITES, AND PARTICIPANTS I designed the study to focus on interpreters working in K–12 classrooms with Deaf or hard of hearing students who had been placed in inclusive settings with hearing classmates and teachers rather than in classes with students who relied primarily on oral communication methods such as lipreading, spoken language skills, and/or residual hearing. I focused on interpreters working in elementary schools for several reasons . First, some interpreters and school administrators assume that it must be easier to interpret in elementary settings than in higher grades, because the content and vocabulary commonly used in classrooms with young students is presumably not as sophisticated as the language used in high school or college. For example, the teacher of Deaf and hard of hearing students who was responsible for placing interpreters in her district at one of the three participating school sites reported that the interpreters who pass the in-house evaluation at the first (beginning) of nine levels are always placed in the primary grades (lower primary grades whenever possible). She explained that as interpreters get more proficient and gain a larger signed vocabulary, they often move up to higher grades along with the students that they were originally placed with. After interpreters have spent some time on the job, she said, they are able to do a better job keeping up with the pace of the information delivered in higher grades. Since lesser-skilled interpreters are often hired to interpret for primary grades and there is a perception that novice interpreters would be better 28 : chapter 3 equipped to handle the demands of interpreting in elementary school than more rigorous upper-level academic content, an investigation of what these interpreters are called upon to do was warranted.6 Moreover, because there were no in-the-field...