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D'Hayer, Danielle (2021) To what extent and in what ways do communities of practice facilitate learning in the context of professional development for interpreting students and practitioners? Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
Conference interpreting is a highly competitive and selective profession where careers are built on skills and reputation. Students, graduates and new practitioners experience a gap between the end of their intensive guided studies and their engagement in the impermeable landscape of professional practice. This lonely experience in this no man’s land induces an identity crisis and a need for further professional development that has not yet been investigated.
This study explores whether the concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) within a Social Learning framework offers a collaborative approach to support the transformative trajectory of interpreting students to becoming professional interpreters engaged in the market, and to potentially bring the interpreting profession to value, nurture and care for newcomers.
This qualitative study is based on the longitudinal investigation of the reported experience of participation in two case studies, selected for their potential to operate as CoPs: (i) the Ambassadors' Scheme for Interpreting Studies (AS) and (ii) the Virtual Classes (VC), between the academic years of 2013 and 2016.
Underpinned by an interpretivist paradigm, this research adopted a hermeneutical phenomenological approach that focuses on the centrality of individual perceptions of real world experience in the data collection and analysis. A six-step thematic analysis model was applied to analyse the data corpus made up of two questionnaires, ten semi-guided interviews and four focus groups.
The results of that analysis indicate that the AS is a social learning space that operates as a CoP, whereas the VCs are not, but rather represent a network of tutors. The originality of this study resides in the observation of a dynamic rather than static experience of participation in a CoP; it identifies three temporal phases that represent developmental participation stages: before, during and after participation in the AS and the VC.
The data identifies that the added value of participation in the AS is multi-layered. It first encourages agency which contributes to setting a horizontal (non-hierarchical and integrated) egalitarian dynamic participation within and across boundaries between students, ambassadors and Professional Interpreters Newly Engaged in the Interpreting Market. It then inspires motivation, trust and togetherness which enable learning and identity transformation within a community by caring, giving and sharing. The custodian of the community is the course leader functioning as the social artist that leads and sustains the community over academic cycles of participation as an act of service.
The absence of negotiation of meaning with all participants in the VCs leads to a traditional skill-based interpreting practice approach that does not spark further collaborative initiatives, thus demonstrating the importance and value of negotiation of meaning when designing for the emergence of CoPs.
This study invites the interpreting education profession to go further than the current apprenticeship model, and activate the concept of learning as social participation. The formal integration of alumni to a horizontal CoP every academic year offers regularity in the life cycle of the community and value creation to all participants. It sows the seeds for a CoP mindset that sustains beyond participation and so has the power to transform the ethical values of the interpreting profession. Finally, these findings are transferable to all professional courses (but not only) within and beyond Higher Education.
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