We’re closing in on the year-end exams. In a few weeks, the Transition Exam will determine who among the Year One students will go on to Year Two. A short time after that, the Exit Exam will decide who among the Year Two students will graduate from the MCI.
Because these high-stakes tests are on the horizon, I’m spending a lot of time practicing with all the students, from both years, and from all language groups. But after a particularly productive practice session with the Arabic team, I found myself reflecting on the role of Arabic within the MCI.
Arabic is somewhat new to us. Indeed, this is the first year we have had Arabic speakers in the second year of the program. And in the same way that working with all our other language teams has allowed me to grow as a teacher, so too has working with the Arabic group been a learning experience. Here are the top three lessons that these students have taught me.
1. A new understanding of geopolitics
Any interpreter worth their salt has to be keeping at least one eye on news from the Middle East. But I found I needed a different focus when training future professionals whose bread and butter will be the Middle East. To keep up with my Arabic students, I have had to study! Topics on my reading list include the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fallout from the Lebanese civil war, the ongoing Syrian crisis, the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, and the influence of regional powers like Saudi Arabia or Iran.
But more importantly, my students have allowed me to understand perspectives that are not often aired in the English or French media. When they work with me, the students interpret into English speeches given by representatives of Arabic-speaking nations. At times, this has been my first opportunity to hear Middle Eastern leaders describe events in their countries from their own point of view. Ask the , for example, about the origins of terrorism, and you’ll hear a discourse that is rarely unfiltered in Western news sources. In other words, my Arabic students have given me a window to a new world.
2. Teaching effectively across cultures
Teaching in the MCI reminds me that I am very much a product of my time and my place. My ideas about being a “good teacher” are rooted in a North American way of thinking. In the early 1990s, a few years before I started teaching, educator suggested that professors should go from being the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side”. This since, and I find that the discussion has had an impact on me.
In the classroom, I try to let students be at the centre of the learning. For example, I often ask my Year Two students to go out and compile a menu of speeches that we will interpret during a class or practice session. I ask them which objectives they think they need to work on. I let them lead the assessment of interpreting performances. I comment last — sometimes, if students have been targeted and fair in their own assessments, I don’t comment at all.
I noticed that my Arabic students at times seemed confused by my approach to teaching. Their reactions were not what I was expecting. I mentioned this to a colleague who teaches English-to-Arabic interpreting at the MCI — a professional who has worked in the Arabic booth at the and at . He helped me to see that my teaching was culturally specific. It is based on assumptions of individualism and low power distance, and these aren’t assumptions that everyone shares. He encouraged me to take centre stage with the Arabic students and to provide a lot more explicit direction. In short, to be an effective teacher, I had to be ready to adapt my approach to meet the expectations of the cultural groups I work with. I had to be open to change.
3. Drilling down to find new techniques
One of the members of our Arabic team this year is blind. So he has an untraditional technique for consecutive interpreting. He takes notes using a word processor on a laptop, and he listens to a note-reading app on his computer through an earpiece when he gives his rendition. Because he works differently than the other students, the way we teach analysis has had to change.
Recently, we interpreted a speech in which the speaker described a psychological experiment. In it, participants were asked to look first at pleasant images of children petting a cat or eating an ice cream cone. Then, participants were asked to look at unpleasant images of children crying or looking sad. With a traditional notepad approach, we would map things out on the page to represent the relationships between ideas. There are two conditions, pleasant and unpleasant, that are being compared. Each condition is illustrated by two examples. We capture the comparison by dividing the page in half vertically and having the pleasant and unpleasant conditions placed on the same horizontal plane. We know the examples are just that because they are indented compared to the main ideas, the conditions.
But the word processor and note reader don’t allow my student to work this way. He could, for example, indent his examples when he is taking notes. However, the note reader won’t actually say “indent” when it reads the notes to him through the earpiece. That information would be lost.
After thinking about it, we came up with a series of abbreviations that he could use to mark logical relationships at the beginning of each line of text. The “cf” tells him that one packet of information is the start of a comparison, and that he should be listening for the next “cf” that marks the second half. The illustrations aren’t indented, but they are marked with their own code, “eg”.
The point here is that finding a technique for this particular student required some head-scratching. I had to rethink what I would normally do and find a new strategy that yielded the same results. I had to rework . I will admit that I felt a little frustrated when I realized that my usual bag of tricks was not going to work. But I also felt excited when our joint problem-solving actually yielded a solution. I enjoyed the challenge.
I hope that all these learning points also work in reverse for my Arabic students. When they interpret speeches chosen by students in the other language groups, they also have an opportunity to learn about issues and points of view they might not ordinarily encounter. Being exposed to realities in the French-, Mandarin-, Portuguese-, Russian- and Spanish-speaking worlds allows them to expand their learning.
Similarly, watching how the other students interact with the instructors exposes them to different cultural norms. This will come in handy as they bridge cultures in their professional careers. Finally, watching me work with their peers to find new ways to analyze also lets them observe people thinking outside the box in real time.
The bottom line is that all of us in the MCI — students and teachers — constantly grow in a rich learning environment. And that environment is all the richer, thanks to the contribution of my Arabic-speaking students. Think you have what it takes to join the MCI’s Arabic team? Start the application process by sending us an e-mail today.