Itinerant Learning and Development

It has been found that part of the technical work of Insight is done by building the organisation into an interpreter learning community and a knowledge exchange hub (6.3.1). An alternative institutional work of knowledge management is to motivate interpreters to become autonomous learners and channel organisational resources to support knowledge acquisition through practice. This involves recognising the fragmented nature of PSI knowledge and promoting learning and improvement through doing the job—the central claims in what Kunda and Barley (2004) termed “itinerant professionalism”.

Managers believe that to cultivate the contextualised competence, interpreters should be

“proactive learners” and “responsible for their own professional development” [A-Mng-1]. This indicates the practice of itinerant professionalism that practitioners should rely on their own efforts to keep their knowledge and skills updated. Interview results show that interpreters are very familiar with this creed as it has been frequently advertised through early encounters with managers and via the training sessions they sit through [B-Int]. The Director explicitly expressed her expectation that “our interpreters should not be dummies”:

They are not just sitting there to be fed with information, they need to be proactive; we have already provided them with a lot of materials, but that is just a guide. They need to work beyond this minimum. [A-Director]

Insight managers also insisted that interpreters should be self-motivated and diligent when preparing for each assignment, as they highly value one’s professional commitment to the job and considers the pre-assignment study essential in the course of knowledge acquisition:

Another good way of increasing knowledge is to prepare for the assignments.

If you don't prepare, you only get yourself complained really. You don't know

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something you should’ve really known. If you go to a housing option appointment, and you ended up not knowing there is a bidding process in the council housing, then it is your own fault. [A-Director]

Noticeably, while preparation often hinges upon the information obtained from the clients through agencies, the team are aware that an exhaustive compilation of relevant information can be hard to provide simply due to the nature of the assignment. In the words of a manager to interpreters:

We try to give out as much information as possible, but sometimes there is a limit on how much we can get. What’s going on in a GP appointment? The GP doesn't know what gonna come up from the patients. Then it goes back to your wider reading, knowing your body parts and general illness. [A-Mng-2]

The “wider reading” emphasised the commitments that interpreters will have to make in the pre/pro-assignment learning in order to keep themselves updated. Even with regular practice and reviews of encyclopaedic knowledge, new jargons and challenges can still appear at any minute and that requires interpreters to invent their own solutions on the spot. This resembles one of the salient features of itinerant professionalism—solo contractors often exercise their discretion to resolve a problem without ready-made solutions (Kunda and Barley 2004). For example, in their office chat over the meaning of “skirting” and “coving”, managers candidly admit the difficulties one might encounter and the ensuing solutions one might come up with:

X- Last time I just forgot the word skirtings, Y- What? What is skirting?

X- The lines all around the wall, see that? And I knew it was, but I was like, my god! But it was the client knew it, so..., you just feel so bad …

Y- I don't know this in Spanish! But you should say thank you (nodding the head), don't panic, there is nothing wrong with us not knowing the name.

Z- Well you know the thing on the top, what’s that called? Along the walls, in the angle, between the ceiling and the wall, there is a thing. It’s “coving”. That can come up as well, it’s skirting board and coving.

Y- I didn't know that. Let me check… (using her phone), it’s not even said in the digital dictionary. So you know, even if you get it you have to say it doesn’t exist.

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Z- It’s a building term, building materials.

X-Or even worse like speaking to the client, ‘Oh that thing, you don't need to know’! Haha…

Y- Or you point at it generally—that stuff on the walls… [A-Mng, author’s emphasis]

Although speakers above might only chat together in a half-joking way, the conversation reveals the possible yet controversial responses that interpreters might give in real scenarios. The decision could be apologising for not knowing the word but being grateful for the interlocutors’ understanding; it could be making an informed guess (“even if you get it you have to say it doesn’t exist”); it could be suggesting to the clients that the term has intended private or insignificant nature (“Oh that thing, you don't need to know”);

and it could also be using visual references to get the meaning across (“you point at it generally, that stuff on the walls”). Each strategy is plausible depending on specific situations, and interpreters have to gauge and judge based on the dynamics of the on-going dialogue in situ. As reflected in the field notes, this propels manager to believe that it is through doing the job that interpreters develop their competencies. The day-to-day work contexts provide first-hand sources of knowledge and becomes the point of reference for practitioners to improvise solutions, making the highly unpredictable predictable [jnl]. Itinerant professionalism confirms this unique way in which contractors acquire knowledge. The following field notes recorded how interpreters identify themselves with the “itinerant experts”:

Interpreter A came back to the office in a very low mood after her assignment.

She grumbled to Interpreter B: “Damn it, no clients again!” A continued to explain that “something for two weeks like this” and she thought it was really bad because since last appointment she has done nothing so far. B immediately comforted her: “Well, some people will be happy with that, haha. I know you are not.” A then complained, looking disappointedly, “but I am not practising, and this one was a good one, could last for 2 hours. I’ve prepared; I want to keep my crafts brushed up, you know.” B confirmed and shared her thought:

“Ya I know, quite a few our interpreters feel the same. They know they would get paid anyway, but they still feel they are useless and the time is wasted.” [jnl]

Interpreters A felt disenchanted about having gone to an medical appointment without doing her job because the patient did not show up. Between the lines she expressed the

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sense of anxiety that her skills are declining if she is not practising and the disappointment that she missed the opportunity to interpret for two hours. Both of their perception of the skill acquisition and maintenance process highlights their awareness of the interdependence between knowledge and practice in the PSI profession. This point of view gains strong support from both Insight and non-Insight interpreters across the field.

When asking “Have you had opportunities to learn new skills?”, 90% of the answers are highlighted by key words such as “through working”, “practising”, “repeating in different jobs” and “preparing”. A typical answer from one of the senior interpreters is:

I have no idea of those organs in English. That’s why I must study and practise them. And that’s how I improve myself. You might learn from your first assignment about what you didn’t do well and next time you will improve because you don't want to lose your face! After many times of working in the same clinic, you will sort of know the basic routine. The more you do, the more you are sharpening your language. You know how things gonna go. [B-Int-15]

Naturally, agencies have the potential to become the knowledge regenerating centre through assigning workloads to interpreters and ‘bricolaging’ their expertise deriving from practice. This is where Insight approach fits in and reproduces the itinerant professionalism. In fact, it is quite an established practice in Insight to allocate work to novice interpreters to “test the waters”, as the director often emphasised, “you prepare as much as you can, but you need to do it to know how it works” [A-Director]. This is not to say that interpreters will be on their own and uncared for.

Before each assignment, the administrative team will brief trainee interpreters with contextualised information that can help to reduce the uncertainty of the interaction.

Advice includes, for example, “if you don’t see the solicitor, the police guarding at the door of the courtroom is usually your man. He’s got a list of names to call” [A-Mng-2], or “the nurse may ask you to stay in the ward but make sure you wear the blue disposable gown outside, just next to handrail” [A-Mng-1]. In turn, interpreters find Insight colleagues extremely good at helping them to “learn the ropes of the job” [B-int-11].

They mostly feel that they are able to obtain suggestions that could not have come from elsewhere. In fact, the majority of the participants express their confusion at the procedural knowledge that comes to play in specific work settings. Yet such knowledge is “very hard to obtain from those who haven’t done the job” [B-Int-10]. Some participants convey their hesitation to call agencies with queries for fear of being labelled as incompetent or losing jobs: “I am a bit scared to tell them what I feel difficult about,

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because they might be judgy of me and nothing gonna be resolved anyway.” [B-Int-9]

It is through training-on-the-job that Insight becomes the gatekeeper of the profession entry. Professional work itself has been seen as part of training resources with different level of difficulty; interpreters are thus expected to “build up the confidence” through accumulation of the itinerate knowledge. As a job provider, agencies are subsequently not only controlling access to the resources that interpreters have to rely on in order to have their skills updated, but are also contributing to the construction of the knowledge base of PSI through organising training and development activities and reflective practices.

6.3.3 Summary

This section examined the knowledge creation process in an organisational learning environment and its impact on professional knowledge acquisition. Insight managers propose an alternative knowledge framework built on individual’s experiential understanding which is directly derived from work practices. This is feasible because the work organisation has the resources, infrastructure and mediums facilitate the knowledge conversion processes (tacit-explicit). The technical work to institutionalise such a framework can be broken down into two aspects. Re-evaluating professional knowledge structure (6.3.1) focused on externalising tacit elements from the explicit professional knowledge and providing an organisational platform to enable knowledge sharing and collective learning. While this aspect mainly attends to how members reproduce professional knowledge at the organisational level and how the organisation becomes the centre of re-evaluating knowledge structure, the second aspect (6.3.2) elaborates on how knowledge is forged outside the organisation yet considerably influenced by Insight intervention, and how the contextualised competence of interpreters is cultivated in practice. Itinerant professionalism is identified as an intrinsic nature of knowledge acquisition both by freelance interpreters who ‘pick up’ practical knowledge from work and by managers who use on-the-job training mechanisms to familiarise novice interpreters with real work challenges.