Master Mentor Curriculum

Course Module I

Section I: Course Outlines

Course: Mentoring I
Time required: 140-180 hours
Instructor hours: 3 teaching hours per week, 3-6 office hours per week
Credits: 3 credits

Course Introduction
This is the first course in a series of four making up the Master Mentor Program. It is intended to encourage students to see themselves as specialized adult educators who can help working interpreters undertake an ongoing process of personal and professional development. From the beginning students tackle head on the limited and limiting view of mentors as people who do diagnostic skill assessment and “quick fix” remediation. In contrast, this course and the program as a whole work towards a deeper exploration of mentoring, and the contribution it can make to the field of interpreter education.

The starting point for this approach is a focus on the range of subtle skills that go into doing strong interpretations. Catching and conveying meaning in all kinds of different communications situations requires high levels of cultural understanding and communications competence. From this perspective interpreters will only fundamentally improve their technical skills if they can learn to see communications contexts in a different way. This course invites students to explore the range of skills a mentor needs to support this kind of growth in their mentees.

Students work on understanding issues in cultural diversity, and adult cognitive development; they undertake self-reflection on their own skills as communicators; they consider ethical and political issues implicit in all situations where the participants do not have equal power; they learn about structuring and managing mentorship relationships and they discover and work with some key decision-making activities and analysis tools. An important focus of the course is preparing students to make their own contribution to the understanding of mentoring, and particularly as it applies to the field of sign language interpretation.

Course Description

In one sense Mentorship I is a survey course. It meets the usual requirement of a first course in any program—which is to give entering students some concepts and a basic outline or survey of their field of study. The “survey” they undertake, however, covers many different landscapes:

academic territory about mentoring reflected in required readings and in the lectures of the instructors;
an interior landscape of personal culture which everyone brings to communication situations;
a cultural landscape displaying the huge diversity of seen and unseen cultural markers and characteristics of hearing and deaf people alike;
overview of needs in the interpreting field and potential routes forward; and
inventory of analysis tools mentors may use in their work.

The objective is not for students to learn mentoring by learning what others know about it. After starting out with some grounding in the field, students work with a range of materials and experiences in order to develop their own deeper personal understanding of mentoring. The purpose of the survey is to help them produce their own maps for exploring their future work in the field.

Pedagogy
The content, shape and learning activities in the course are based on the model of a guided journey of self-exploration. Students, in other words, put themselves in the position of mentees ready to begin a process of self-development. Their mentor is not any particular instructor, but the course environment itself. It is an environment that offers opportunities to learn, tackle development challenges and get feedback. The students also take on the tasks of mentoring each other as learners as they participate in collaborative learning processes.

Course Design Strategies

Students are given access to many guest instructors and perspectives so they can experience many views, many teaching styles and different approaches to evaluation. Through distance delivery, the course is able to recruit some leaders in the field to give students their own particular angles on mentoring.
The lead instructor provides linking commentary that gives the course its coherence. The lead instructor also is the resource person helping students with the logistics of participation.

Assignments

Assignments reflect the pedagogy of self-directed learning: 50 percent of the grade is achieved by contributing to group discussion.

40 percent of the grade comes from postings related to group discussion. Throughout the semester each student is required to make 42 contributions. In some cases they are offering their own insights into assigned readings, in others they are offering feedback on ideas others in the class have contributed. Sometimes, they are offering new material for consideration in terms of reviews of pertinent web-sites or other materials they have found relevant to a particular topic under discussion. They are required to take personal responsibility for the collaborative learning by making regular contributions.
10 percent comes from preparing an assigned discussion summary highlighting themes, disagreements and new questions.

Grading and Its Learning Objectives

The other part of the grade is earned by demonstrating a personal awareness of the skills of mentoring.

10 percent comes from completing the language skills portion of their portfolio project (see below).
20 percent comes from specific written assignments.
20 percent comes from a final academic paper on mentoring, applying insight from group discussions and readings to an analysis of their own progress towards understanding mentoring. They were also required to comment on the papers of two other classmates.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successfully completing the course students will:

be able to define internal and external parameters of particular mentoring situations and develop appropriate strategies for working within them.
understand issues of advocacy and intervention connected to interpreting and to mentoring.
use their knowledge of the field of interpreting and interpreting education to identify a role for themselves as mentors.
identify their own background cultural beliefs and attitudes and recognize their effects on communication with other people.
demonstrate their knowledge of cultural values of others and have a plan for how to extend their culture-specific awareness of others.
locate mentoring in the paradigm of adult learning—recognize cognitive and emotional strategies mentees may use as they go through a process of self-development, and use these insights in structuring and maintaining the mentoring relationship.
understand and use various tools and exercises relevant to mentoring—portfolio, demand/control analysis, workbooks on mentoring practices, materials provided by instructors.
demonstrate an understanding of the nature of fundamental linguistic skills required for interpreting.
take into account the impact they have on others as a person and particularly as a person in the power position of mentor.
experience personal development through collaboration; begin to shift their ideas about the nature of education from teacher-centered (following) to student-centered (leading)

Course Structure

The course is divided into six sections:

Section I: The first section is devoted to helping students to orient themselves to the learning environment. The main focus is for students to understand the requirements on them to participate and the logistics for doing so. (See Implementation Guide)

Section II: Students then jump immediately into the portfolio project. They are provided with general guidelines by the portfolio project instructor but are required to begin their own learning by finding resources, and discussing them with their peers. (See Implementation Guide)

Section III: The “survey” aspect of the course begins in Section III in which students learn about approaches to mentoring in the US, and its significance in the field of interpretation. They then turn their focus inwards and begin a process of self-analysis to discover the “who” of mentoring.

Section IV: Students continue their examination of “who” is involved in mentoring by thinking about the key cultural characteristics they themselves and others display in all interactions. The “who” question can really only be properly posed when they have acquired some cultural competence.

Section V: Students consider the usefulness of adult learning theory in mapping and managing mentoring relationship.

Section VI: Students are introduced to demand-control schema, a key analysis tool for analyzing and managing decision-making challenges in different interpreting situations.

In the pilot running of the course, students got the chance to learn from guest instructors with recognized experience in the particular section topic. These instructors provided materials, exercises and assignments to encourage exploration in their particular subject matter. One benefit of this structure is that students are exposed to different teaching styles and offered different kinds of assignments. The lead instructor provides links between the contributions of the guest instructors and offers the class a number of questions to guide their progress. (See Section II of this module, “What We Did”)

Materials Used

Central text
The book, Mentor (Daloz, L. 2000) was chosen as a central text. The text captures the experience of a mentor working in an institution of higher education helping adult students to plan academic activities that will meet their more or less hidden life goals.

How the Text Was Used
Specific chapters of the text were required reading for different sections of the course, along with commentary on the assigned chapters offered by the lead instructor. These commentaries are not summaries but personal and professional responses to the text linking it into the immediate topic and to issues specifically in the field of interpretation. The commentaries model an approach to reading for the students and they highlight points the instructor finds of special interest to the project of developing an understanding of mentoring. Another general text could be used and worked into the course structure in the same way.

Section II: What We Did

In this section of the course module we lay out details of how Mentorship I was run in the pilot program. We detail the contributions of the particular group of instructors who were involved. Our objective is to spark reflection on ways to meet the course objectives when new faculty and new materials are involved.

Our Choice of Text
After reviewing some 15 possible titles we settled on Mentor (Daloz, L. 2000). We found it valuable for a number of reasons.

It offers a perspective on mentoring from outside the field of interpreting. However, it can easily be applied to the interests and concerns of interpreter educators. The author offers great insight into the challenges of mentoring, and the transformations that effective mentoring effects. His approach is based on knowledge of adult education.
The author presents his accumulated mentoring knowledge as a number of stories about the personal journeys of particular individuals. He charts their progress, highlighting their initial questions, their responses to their own choices, and their dawning understanding of their own more hidden goals and values. It is a very accessible style of writing, which invites readers to reflect on their own experiences with either mentoring or being mentored.
In a non-expository way, the text also pulls together central insights on the mentoring process, and what that process feels like for the mentor. It subtly invites readers to a process of self-analysis and thus models mentoring even in the text/reader interaction.

To complement the main text, we chose materials from several disciplines that focus on supporting human development-- social work, education, anthropology, studies in multiculturalism. The materials also differed widely in style and tone, providing an inclusive learning atmosphere. Some of the readings chosen were papers in edited volumes or academic journals. Some were materials prepared by other organizations, including the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) and the National Multicultural Interpreting Project (NMIP). Guest instructors prepared signed versions of their presentations and English translations appear on the course website. We also used powerpoint slide shows, graphics and exercises. In addition, student postings on course topics and postings of their written assignments were required reading for all. This final component of peer-produced work proved to be a key element in student involvement with the concept of mentorship, as the authors of postings and papers produced meaning and “made sense” for themselves and other students.

Syllabus of the Course

I: Course Introduction

Since the pilot course was offered through distance delivery, students were given some time learning about how web-based learning communities work. They were introduced to strategies of interaction between students and between students and instructors. The real need to develop a digital attendance and participation record for themselves was stressed. This requirement to participate was presented as part of the learning process of becoming a mentor as well as a traditional requirement for earning grades. The focus of this section was to set up the infrastructure for collaborative work and to clarify that each student is also in some respects a mentor and teacher for others in the course because each has his or her own experiences to contribute to the group task of understanding mentorship.

II: Portfolio Project Introduction

(See Implementation Guide for information on our approach to the production and assessment of portfolios in the Master Mentor Program) The guest portfolio project instructor in the pilot program was Dr. Dennis Cokely, a specialist in assessment of interpreting skill, among other areas. Cokely encouraged students to think “outside the box” in their efforts to represent their skill levels, and required students always to articulate their own processes of decision making. To all direct requests for "right" answers he would respond that the question was like the question, “How long is a piece of string?” Therefore, he could only provide a similar answer, “It depends.”

After 3 weeks of intensive discussion, students continued to explore portfolios and submitted a portfolio of their language skills at the end of the course.

Optional Reading:
Formality and Informality in Communication Events, Judith T, Irvine, American Anthropologist, Volume 81, 1979, pp 773-90

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III: Mentoring: What, Why, Who?

Students began their exploration of what mentoring is in a very practical way—by thinking about what mentoring support is needed now in the field. In the past interpreters learned most of their ASL skills and their grasp of Deaf culture directly from members of the deaf community. But the model of interpreter education has changed. Now most novice interpreters get their knowledge from coursework in an Interpreter Education Program. These graduates lack the ASL skills and deaf community connections of an older generation of interpreters, and they find that there is a huge learning curve after graduation, when they begin working with deaf clients.

Mentors are now recognized to be a key support for novice interpreters in their transition into accomplished bilingual communicators, but the nature of that support requires analysis. In part, the challenges new interpreters face on the job are helping to increase understanding about the whole range of skills involved in interpreting. They are also leading mentors to reflect on the skills and knowledge they need to help novice interpreters become more accomplished communicators.

Students begin this analysis pushing off from the required readings and from lead-off questions provided by the instructor’s commentary: What keys do mentors really hold to unlock barriers novice interpreters face? Is it helpful to provide students with words that describe their current skills and weaknesses? Would that vocabulary help mentees to link into existing resources and a wider view of their own development possibilities? How do mentors deal with the power issues of “holding the keys” to professional skill levels. How do mentors balance the pressing goal of helping students learn particular new strategies with the longer-term goal of helping them to become better overall communicators?

Guest Instructor Gary Sanderson then led the class into an exploration of the need for and nature of mentoring support. His presentation, Mentoring for Sign Language Interpreters offered some theoretical frameworks built up during his thirty years experience at California State University at Northridge’s National Center on Deafness. He discussed the need for mentors to help new graduates get a better grasp of “what deafness is all about.” He also outlined the characteristics mentors need to have or develop, and the different functions they may fill in various settings and situations.

The second guest lecturer, Robert Lee, is an experienced mentor and teacher of interpreting. Lee led a theoretical excursion into what mentoring is about. He suggested three axes of reflection—theoretical, developmental and pragmatic —that can help students “situate” or imagine themselves at work as mentors. He encouraged students to think beyond roles and models for mentoring behavior, to focus on the idea of a mentor’s “world view.” He uses the term to mean a total set of values and beliefs that each of us has and that have an impact on how people behave in their interactions with others. Mentors can use this concept to reflect on background ideas they unthinkingly contribute to their interactions with mentees and the impact these assumptions might be having on their mentoring relationship.

This idea opens a huge territory of self-analysis connected to professional skills in mentoring which students will continue to explore throughout the course. Lee suggested a developmental approach, which recognizes that people’s views and skills change over time depending on what they experience. In the field of interpreting, for instance, people move from being students or beginning practitioners to being interpreters to being experienced practitioners, to being teacher/mentors. As they progress they do not just leave past stages behind but incorporate their earlier skills and worldview into a new shape—a change of clothing is his image. Earlier stages can be revisited and may be useful in understanding the issues of mentees. In closing. Lee mentioned several pragmatic aspects of communications situations mentors may have to take account of in analyzing and understanding their work.

Lee’s focus then was on the “who” aspect of mentoring. This question was taken up again in the next section when students explore who they are as communicators when interaction situations are seen through a lens of cultural diversity.

Assigned readings:

Daloz: Preface, Chapters 1 and 2

CIT Proceedings 10th national convention, 1994

IV: Mentoring as Communicative and Cultural Competence

Students were asked to focus on the idea that all people have a wide range of characteristics including race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and any number of other dimensions of diversity, seen or unseen. This idea needs to be clearly articulated in the field of sign language interpreting where it is sometimes taken for granted that deafness in the only significant cultural characteristic a person may have. The focus here then was on improving communication outcomes by thinking of all the deaf and hearing participants as individuals with a range of backgrounds and cultural understandings.

Students were asked to reflect on their own set of cultural parameters, a “personal culture” that they bring to every interaction. For members of dominant cultural groups this is sometimes a difficult task as they tend to see themselves just as “normal” and assume that only members of visible or other minorities are “different” or “special”. In this section students did some exercises to identify their grounding beliefs and attitudes and began to use their insights to increase their sensitivity to people with other cultural characteristics. Students were working towards defining “cultural competence,” how it is acquired and how it is taught or modeled for others.

Two guest instructors participated in this section, both of whom were involved in the development of the National Multicultural Interpreting Project (NMIP). They provided students with a vital perspective on the complexity of cross cultural communications and the special awareness that participants need to acquire so that they can create a climate of respect that make successful exchanges possible.

Students are required to explore the curriculum developed by the NMIP. The work of this group opens up the possibility of transforming the interpreting curriculum by looking at issues from the points of view of different cultural, gender, or sexual orientation groupings within the D/deaf communities. The work points to the need to add cultural competence to the list of skills of interpreters and also to the repertoire of mentors.

The first guest instructor was Anthony Aramburo who shared his experience as an African American interpreter, and particularly his insights on cross-cultural mentoring relationships. He pointed to the importance of mentoring for African American interpreters working in the still pervasive context of institutional racism, and highlighted some of the characteristics that a mentoring relationship has to have to support African American community values. He introduced students to the concept of phases in mentoring relationships. In his analysis both monocultural and cross-cultural mentoring passes through: initiation, cultivation, separations, redefinition phases.
The second guest instructor in this section was Jan Nishimura who led further exploration about cultural competence in her discussion, Mentoring Across Cultures. She provided students with some ideas about how to measure and contrast the givens in one culture against those of other cultures. Do particular individuals values extended family or small families, harmony or control, individuality or interdependence? Do they see time as given or as measured out? These differences, and awareness of them, have great impact on communications successes or failures.

Students were encouraged to make an extended investigation of cultural competence, and how they might acquire or improve their current strengths in this area. They did a number of exercises to increase self-awareness and also analyze case study examples of cross cultural mentoring situations in order to identify traps they might encounter and strategies that they might use. They made a beginning on identifying characteristics of culturally competent mentors. These include awareness of self and impact on others, ability to generate a wide variety of responses where flexibility is needed, willingness to wait, ability to laugh at oneself, and to take active steps to learn more about other cultures.

The lead instructor, Dr. Elizabeth Winston, director of the TIEM Program, built on the perspectives offered by the guest instructors. She pointed to the monocultural foundations of the field of interpreting and its predominantly female membership, and invited reflection on the communications consequences that might come from this. She also asked how cultural competence ties in with issues of power in mentoring relationships, where one partner is (almost by definition) seen to have more wisdom than the other.

These issues of acknowledged and unacknowledged power were addressed further through a series of readings about cultural competence in intervention settings. Students were asked to try some unconventional thinking and examine mentoring and interpreting as cases of intervention behavior. Could they see the interpreters who make decisions based on the cultural and information needs of their clients as “interveners?” How does this perspective fit with the code of ethics of the profession? How much is the code of ethics driven by monocultural understanding of the values of human interaction? and in what circumstances might it need to be revisited? When does code following need to give way to active decision-making?

Assigned readings:

Developing Cross-cultural Competence (editors: Lynch and Hanson), chapters 1,2,&3
Ethical, cultural and language diversity in intervention settings, Marcia Hanson
Conceptual Frameworks: from culture shock to cultural learning, Eleanor Lynch.
What does culture have to do with the education of students who are deaf and hard of hearing? Dr. Claire Ramsay
Mentorship : A Sign of the Times: a guide to mentoring in the field of sign language interpreting produced by RID Region IX.

Assignment:

One of two specific course assignments related to ideas covered in section IV. Students were asked to prepare an analysis of their own cultural characteristics for 10% of the course grade.

V: Mentoring and Stages of Learning

The focus of this section was how and why and when adult learners grow. Students consider the characteristics of adult learners and the stages they pass through in accepting challenge and change. They are introduced to some theories of cognitive development and use them to frame their own experiences as learners and those of the interpreters they work with. The value of knowledge about stages of learning for adults was explored in relation to mentoring practices and insights. Students are introduced to some benchmarking ideas for measuring mentee progress, and also some challenges that they will face as mentors.

In this section, students were encouraged to develop a philosophy of learning which will guide their future work as mentors. They explored how mentees can be supported in their move away from external validation and towards belief in their own ability to develop internally coherent accounts. As students worked through the stories of particular mentees that Daloz offers, they recognized the plateaus and temporary losses of self-esteem that are common in adult experiences of learning. They were asked to consider appropriate mentor responses to these stages. They also considered the pitfalls that mentors face as they come under pressure to provide “the answers.”

The lead instructor offered commentary on each assigned chapter, linking the material specifically to learning experiences of novice interpreters. She highlighted the usefulness to mentors of having “maps of transformation” in their minds drawn form theories of adult cognitive development. Mentors can use these to situate and understand development of mentees, perhaps anticipate difficulties and prepare strategies for handling them.

In the interpreting field she pointed to a common misunderstanding among inexperienced interpreters and students that their job is to be a “passive” channel of information. When they discover that interpreters are constantly called on to make decisions as they work to convey equivalent meaning, they are often overwhelmed. How can mentors handle this strong psychological response and help their mentees move through and not away from difficulties? When mentees express negative emotions as part of their fearful response to the tasks of self-development, how can mentors keep hold of their own self-esteem? She pointed to specific gender issues in the field that arise when female interpreters loose the sense of self they need in order to be effective decision-makers because they focus exclusively on helping others.

Introducing Daloz’ ideas on the dynamics of transformation, the lead instructor asked students to reflect on what it means to grow as a person. What are the foundations of that growth and how can mentors support it? What principles do they need to follow in building and managing their mentoring relationships? She also underlined the importance of a sense of timing in mentoring and of faith in the idea that students can and will progress with their own self-development. She asked students to think about how to refuse the instant gratification of being “the authority” especially if there is a large differential between mentor and mentored interpreter.

In this section students worked again with the RID Region IX materials, and were given access to some copyrighted workbook materials dealing with how to structure a mentoring relationships: Learning Preferences and Target Mentoring, Resources, Matt M Stracevich, Ph.D.

Assigned readings:

Daloz, chapter 3-6
Roles, models and worldviews, Robert G. Lee in Deaf Worlds, Issue 3, Vol 13, 1997
Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, James Gee, London, Falmer Press 131-63

VI: Demand Control Theory

In this section of the course, students were introduced to an approach for analyzing interpreting situations and teaching interpreting skills based on demand-control schema. Originally developed in relation to the health sector workplace, the demand-control schema starts from the idea that no job is inherently stressful. However, in every job there are “demands” or challenges faced by the worker as well as “controls,” resources a worker uses to respond to challenges. The guest instructors for this section, Robyn K. Dean and Robert Q. Pollard, recognized that the theory could be adapted for analyzing the actual demands that context and situation place on interpreters.

Research indicates that graduates from Interpreter Education Programs may have as little as 30% of the actual skills they need, which makes for very stressful early employment experiences. Dean and Pollard suggest that interpreters can manage this state of affairs by applying Demand-Control schema, and note the possibility that this decision analyses tool could reduce burnout and raise retention levels of novice interpreters.

Dean and Pollard pointed to four categories of demands relevant to interpreting situations: linguistic, environmental, interpersonal and intrapersonal, each of which has a corresponding set of control options. Students explored how this theory can be used by mentors to help interpreters to recognize that they can manage interpreting situations. They practiced using pre-prepared pictures of imaginary interpreting situations and were asked to analyze and strategize about factors that could impact on the represented interpretation scenario.

Assigned readings:

The Application of Demand-Control Theory to Sign Language Interpreting: Implications for Stress and Interpreter Training, Oxford University Press 2001.
A Letter of Introduction by Robyn Dean

Assignment:

One of two specific course assignments related to ideas covered in section VI. Students were asked to prepare an analysis of an interpreting situation using demand-control theory for 10% of the course grade.