Ep. 5 – TCI: Connecting The Community & Industry

Watch in ASL

Hi. Welcome to the connected interpreter podcast, where we will explore ways of staying connected to ourselves in our work, acknowledging the impact of our practices and continue to grow as practice professionals. I’m Amanda Smith, an interpreter, educator, coach and creative, and I’d love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting the complexities of human interaction and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference. So today’s episode is specifically about connecting with ourselves and both from a personal and a professional standpoint. And so as you go into listening to this, I want you to think about the following reflective prompts. So:

• what if anything is sparking your care for yourself, the work and others?
• Do you feel moved to take any action? And if so, what and when will you do it?
• What questions arise?
• What insights and connections do you see to yourself and your work? So those are the questions to keep in mind.
• I will answer a few of them at the end as well, and let’s go ahead and get started.

Connecting to Your Communities of Practice

So let’s get started in terms of connecting. If we think about this connected interpreter kind of framework, one of the other areas that’s really important to be connected to is our communities of practice. And I know that that’s a buzzword right now, and I don’t necessarily mean it in that way as much as I mean it other practitioners who are in our local, state or national levels, various professional organizations, our colleagues, our agencies, those kinds of things. So this isn’t something that is necessarily directly available or impacting our everyday gigs, but it is kind of an underpinning or kind of the basket in which we work. And so I think it’s an important area to talk about connection, and not from a right or wrong perspective, but from a maybe an inventory perspective of just taking stock of where we are and where we stand within our community.

Mapping Your Connections – An Inventory Exercise

So back to thinking about the ways that we are connected to our communities of practice. I think there is a number. There are a number of ways that we can be connected, and certainly there are the big, flashy ways. So you might think of somebody who’s on the board of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf *(RID), or the American Translators Association, or any or any of those large national level organizations, and that might feel really distant to you, depending on your involvement and engagement with that. There are certainly a number of interpreters who are engaged with RID purely for credential credentials, and maybe for conferences, but not much beyond that, maybe for their standard practice papers, maybe for some guidance that they offer.

And then there are others who are heavily involved with RID and are engaged with headquarters or the board on a very regular basis. And that is a shaping of the larger kind of practice, credentialing expectations, best practices, kind of thing. And then if we continue with RID, or even ATA, or any other professional organization having to do with interpreting or translation, we then get down to like regions or state levels. And so there are opportunities to be involved on the state level with your professional organization. And that, in my experience, has largely been around professional development, getting connected so that, you know, there’s opportunities for kind of natural mentorship. Sometimes getting organized around worker needs that sort of connection.

And then there’s the connection within smaller groups, if you work for the same company or the same school district or the same agency, or geographically, you work within the same town, you share clients and consumers.

And I think it’s important for you to pay attention to the ways in which you are connected and or not connected. And again, as I mentioned earlier. This is not a judgment call. This is not good or bad. This just is. And there are different seasons of our careers that lead us to more engagement and less engagement, and those are all fine.

Accountability to Your Community

The the the point of inventorying, kind of where I am is to see if it’s still a fit. So we naturally withdraw when there are more pressing needs in our personal life, or if we’ve encountered some sort of disappointment or wounding from being involved in the community of practice. And then there are times that we are moved to get more engaged around various things. So if your state is pursuing licensure or has recently passed licensure, sometimes people get more engaged at that point because there’s going to be something that’s going to impact their their ability to do their work, and all of it is okay.

It takes all of us to create this profession.

I often think about the idea that I’m situated in the United States, so I’ll use the United States government. But I often think of the United States government and that there is, you know, oftentimes a narrative, particularly in election years, of getting involved and getting engaged and that sort of thing, and yet only one person can be president, only so many people. Only 50 people can be senators. No, that’s wrong. 100 people can be senators only. You know, 400 and some can be congressmen. That is not the place for everyone. That is the place for those people, and that might be you someday or even now, right? But there are billions, and you feel free to fact check me millions. I don’t know, I don’t know the numbers. I don’t know the census for the United States of America, but it feels like we have, I’ll at least say, millions of people in the US, and most people in the United States are citizens, not senators, not congressmen, not the president, not in an official capacity, not in a capacity, to pass legislation and those sorts of things, right? But there are also opportunities for engagement on a more local level, right? So there are city councils and there are school boards and there are different opportunities, right? But still, I would argue again, I don’t have any numbers to back this up, so you can argue back if you want, but I would still argue a majority of people are citizens doing their best in their daily lives with other citizens and making decisions on a very individual kind of level, right?

Reflecting on Your Shaping Influences

So if we map that into the interpreting profession, we’re not all going to be board members or teachers in programs or board chairs or any of those kinds of things. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a connection to our community and our communities of practice. So if we go to, you know, the very kind of everyday citizen kind of perspective, that’s how I engage with other colleagues. When we show up for a job together, or when we get together as agency staff or school staff or company staff, right?

How do we behave with one another, and how are we connected to one another in the shaping of our practices on the front lines, kind of idea, right? And then, as you kind of inventory your own capacity, do you have more that you want to give?

Do you have more guidance that you want to give?

Do you have more say that you want to have, and how things progress and unfold from a more systemic perspective from a more law licensure requirement, kind of perspective, right?

And there are opportunities for that.

Navigating the Ebbs and Flows of Engagement

And if you’re not involved in that, you still you still have a say, and you still have influence over how things happen around you. You bring your attitude, you bring your perspective, and you bring your connected self to engage with others around you. So I actually want you to I actually want you to do an activity when you get a chance. I’m imagining most of you driving right now, because that’s when I listen to podcasts. So when you get a chance, come back to this, and I want you to just take like five minutes, and I want you to just brain dump onto a piece of paper. Who has shaped you, who and what has shaped you as the practitioner, into the practitioner that you are today. Who are the mentors, the teachers, the colleagues, the classmates, what particular experiences who or what, who and what has shaped you into the practitioner that you are today. And then, once you’ve done that brain dump, I want you to just take a look at it and just see what you see. Right?

Are you largely shaped by the people closest to you? I would argue that’s probably going to be the case.

Are you involved beyond that? Do you want to be?

Do you have capacity to be if you have been involved beyond that and you aren’t now, what transpired that caused you to draw back and again?

This is not evaluative in any way, like we’re supposed to be doing something and we’re not.

Challenging Limiting Beliefs, Contributing to the Narrative

It’s just a noticing of how things ebb and flow across our careers. It can also just very well be like I did my part at the board level, and now I’m a citizen again, and that that just is how it goes. We’re not meant to be indefinitely in charge of anything, because that’s how dictators get formed, right? So the idea that we serve for a time and leave for a time meanwhile, leaving our fingerprints on things is not necessarily a bad idea, right?

So, yeah, the other question that I would ask, not related to the brain dump necessarily, but for you to just kind of chew on, is, in what ways are you accountable to the community of practice in which you work and the language users that you work with?

So what does accountability look like in regards to this connection to the community. So that’s it for this episode.

Conclusion

And again, I want to, I want you to think about anything that might have sparked your care if you feel moved to action questions that arise, what insights and connections you’re making. I’d love to hear from you about those insights ahas and questions. So feel free to reach out to me at arsmithstudios@gmail.com and you can also sign up for my very intermittent newsletter at arsmithstudios.com and click on the newsletter button in the upper right hand corner. So let me go back and answer some of these questions.

Amanda’s Musings on this Episode

So as I’ve done in the past, I think I want to go back and just answer at least one of the questions that have framed this conversation. And I think, I think I’ll answer the what insights and connections do you see to yourself? I definitely see my relationship to the communities of practice and the communities of language learners to have ebbed and flowed over the years of my career, and to take the shape that I need and or can do at that particular time. I also know that there have been times where I have overstayed my welcome and or overstayed my retreat from engagement, which is why I think the check in is a really important piece. And just recognizing the ways in which we have been shaped by our communities, and that we have shaped our communities because I as a human, I will default to the least, the least obstacles, obstacles route I to conserve energy, those kinds of things. But I also will start adopting stories of like, well, people don’t want me there, or I don’t have anything to say or contribute, or, you know, those kinds of things. And I think it’s important for us to check on that, to just kind of challenge it and say, Do you have capacity right now? Yeah, I probably do. Okay. Are there things that you want to say, Are there places that you want to contribute, are there things that you want to offer, or I don’t have capacity, okay? Is there anything that you feel like is missing from the narrative that you’re hearing around you that you’d like to. Contribute something, and is there a way to do that? Can you email someone who has a louder voice or more of a responsibility? Can you just talk about it with your colleagues that you work with on a regular basis? Can you start the conversation? I think there’s, there’s something to be done and not done on all of the levels. So that is, those are my percolations after having done this podcast, and I would love to hear yours.

So those are my answers to two of the questions, and I’m super curious to hear yours.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai