IW 101: Special Report Part 1: 30 Years BA (Hons) BSL-English Interpreting University of Wolverhampton
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00:00:02 Tim
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Wherever you are, this is the Interpreter's Workshop podcast. I'm Tim Curry, your host. Here we talk everything sign language interpreting the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the sideways of interpreting. If you're a student, a new interpreter, experienced interpreter, this is the place for you. If you want to know more, go tointerpretersworkshop.com.
00:00:28 Tim
Let's start talking... interpreting.
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00:00:34 Tim
And now the quote of the day by English novelist Mary Shelley.
00:00:41 Tim
“The beginning is always today.”
00:00:44 Tim
Today we are looking back at the establishment of the British Sign Language/English interpreting degree at Wolverhampton in the UK. It was 30 years ago this year when it was established by some key figures, three of which we will be speaking to today and celebrate the successes they've had along the way.
00:01:10 Tim
First, let me introduce these key figures.
00:01:15 Tim
We have Professor Megan Lawton, the founder and creator of this program.
00:01:23 Tim
We also have senior lecturer Sarah Bown and former senior lecturer Rebecca Fenton-Ree.
00:01:32 Tim
And another name that comes up often in this interview, former head of the department after Megan Lawton, a Sign Linguist is Kristiaan Dekesel.
00:01:43 Tim
But his bio is in the show description, along with the other bios, to give you a deeper understanding of who we're talking with today.
00:01:54 Tim
So, let's look back and celebrate this great achievement at Wolverhampton University.
00:02:03 Tim
Let's get started.
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00:02:09 Tim
Welcome everyone to the podcast. Sarah, give us an overview of how the university is celebrating this anniversary with a conference very soon.
00:02:20 Sarah
Well, hello. Thank you very much for inviting us here today. It's wonderful to be able to look back and look forward, which is the theme of this conference and it will be next month and it's an opportunity really for us to celebrate our alumni…
00:02:39 Sarah
…and everything that has been achieved over 30 years, and all of our partners, internal and external, who have worked with us during that time for there are so very many, it's going to be a wonderful occasion. We have a range of alumni. Rebecca, Becky is one of them, presenting with us who are presenting on…
00:03:00 Sarah
…expertise, specialisms, research that they have developed in the intervening years since graduating from us. And then in the afternoon it will be an opportunity for us to have round table discussions to look at the big questions for the next 30 years and beyond, uh, the challenges that we foresee and the opportunities available for interpreter education programs and for our profession. So, it looks to be a really exciting day and 30 years is certainly something to celebrate.
00:03:34 Tim
It certainly is. Now to give us all a reference, what was the landscape like for sign language interpreting education in the UK at that time?
00:03:46 Sarah
Well, I know Megan, who was the founder of the program, so I will certainly defer to Megan to give that context and that overview. But just sort of briefly, if we look at the educational and higher education landscape in 1993/94, you know, for the university, that was a period when they had very recently in 1992 changed from the status of Polytechnic College to university status as too were other similar educational establishments around the country at that time.
00:04:19 Sarah
So, it was a period of great change and innovation for the higher education sector as well as for interpreter, education and training. If we look outside of HE around the UK at that time there were examples of short interpreter training courses, for example, you know ones offered by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf.
00:04:43 Sarah
And within the university landscape, we had, for example, at that time and just prior to us, the universities of Bristol, Central Lancashire and also Durham University, which was running the postgraduate interpreter education.
00:04:58 Tim
So, that leads to the question for Megan. Where did the idea come from to create this interpreting program at Wolverhampton?
00:05:08 Megan
Again, I'm going to take you right back into the 1980s. [Tim: hmm] And I'm trained as a TV producer, and I was brought into the University of Wolverhampton to start looking at the use of video for teacher training. At that time it was videotape [Tim: mhmm] and, uh, to cut a long story short, some of the materials they were shooting were useful for the school for the Deaf.
00:05:31 Megan
And the school for the deaf said this would be fantastic if you could just add a sign language interpreter and some subtitles. [Tim: hmm] So, I was able to go and look for some research money and I got three years funding from the European Social Fund, um, to look at the use of video for deaf education in higher education.
00:05:50 Megan
The University of Wolverhampton was then the Wolverhampton Polytechnic and it was very much about innovation. It liked new ideas, so I did a three-year program looking at computer aided design for deaf colleagues, deaf students and that enabled me to start to meet some of the deaf community. I haven't got deafness in my family, but I'm dyslexic, and so I'd always like to do things slightly differently. At the end of that project, I'd worked closely with the Royal National Institute for Deaf People in Birmingham.
00:06:23 Megan
And a lady there called Sheila Grue said to me, “Do you realize there's only 100 interpreters in the UK at the moment and none of them are qualified at degree standard?” And I just thought that was insane, I thought why?
00:06:37 Megan
What? What's going on here? And because I'm a very practical person, I couldn't understand why that was. And there was no education for people. [Tim: mhmm] So, I was able to pitch to my university for two years funding and I went, you know what, in two years’ time, I will have a course that will make us world leading.
00:06:58 Megan
But I wanted a different attitude. So, I'd been working closely over three years with deaf people who have a particular view.
00:07:05 Megan
Perhaps it wasn't as positive as it could’ve been about deaf education and deaf social work.
00:07:10 Megan
I spoke to a lot of them. They were saying, “Well, yeah, we have a really powerful language. We have a really powerful culture. It's about time we will recognize for that culture and language.” So, when it came to pitch to the university about what I wanted to do, I actually pitched to say we should be part of the School of Languages.
00:07:30 Megan
You… we have German, French, Russian, Spanish. We should have sign language as a language.
00:07:37 Megan
And they went, “OK, what's your argument? Why?” And so, I was able to go to the deaf community and talk about sign language having a cultural identity, [Tim: mhmm] having a different grammatical structure. That when people were looking at translating what they needed to do was to go from one language to another.
00:07:59 Megan
And the university went, “OK, that's fine. What else are you going to do?” [Tim slightly chuckles] So, we created the Visual Language Center. And in that visual language center we had a support service for deaf people who wanted to do degrees.
00:08:14 Megan
We had a deaf studies degree program that we studied with other subjects, so, Deaf Studies and Special Education. There’s Deaf Studies and Social Work, Deaf Studies and History, [Tim: mhmm] Deaf Studies and whatever. And that started the year before the interpreting degree course started.
00:08:31 Megan
And then the… when the interpreting degree course started, we've brought in experts who were…uh, there was… It was headed up by an interpreter, Peter Lewellen Jones.
00:08:41 Tim
Mhmm.
00:08:42 Megan
Then we got this young person from Durham University who is a Sign Linguist. That's Kristiaan Dekesel.
00:08:47 Megan
And then because of this language identity, I was able to pitch that we would have deaf staff who were sign language experts, but in a different way to allow them to enter university. That was really important because many deaf people didn't have degrees. There wasn't an opportunity to do a degree in sign language, but they were experts in their own language.
00:09:10 Megan
And in the School of Languages we had native speakers with their expertise in Russian, French, German and I went, I want to say the sign language.
00:09:19 Megan
And so, we were able to employ deaf people who were sign language experts [Tim: mhmm] but without the need to have a degree without the need to be trained as lecturers, as as such. So that's really how it all started.
00:09:34 Megan
It was… not having any kind of knowledge about deafness, but going, “This doesn't make sense. This is a language we should be in the language program.” We should then look at the interpreting degree as the language degrees would be. [Tim: mhmm] So, Peter, Kristiaan, and myself went over to see Marie Haps University in Brussels where they did a lot of the interpreting for the European Community programmes. [Tim: mhmm] And they talked about consecutive interpreting first of all, then simultaneous interpreting.
00:10:07 Megan
And we looked at how they devote their interpreters and use the same kind of structure, [Tim: mmm] for sign language interpreters. So that really gave us that credibility, that it wasn't just something that was a social aspect, but it was a real profession. [Tim: mhmm]
00:10:23 Megan
And within that profession also that as an interpreter, you might be a, uh, a freelancer.
00:10:30 Megan
You might need to have specialisms and that was really important to have that credibility that it was an interpreting degree.
00:10:38 Megan
It just happened to be in British Sign language and English. With that we became the first degree of its type in Europe. I then was able to go over to Gallaudet University… [Tim: mmm]
00:10:49 Megan
…and also, to the National Institute for Deaf People at Rochester. [Tim: mhmm] And I gave a conference presentation and an…
00:10:58 Megan
At the time, people were saying, “Well Gallaudet is the gold standard.” [Tim: yeah] But when I looked at that situation, I thought actually, we want deaf students to be able to do civil engineering, history, politics, philosophy. They need interpreters who can cope with the language in those degrees.
00:11:18 Tim
Mhmm.
00:11:19 Megan
At the time, many of the interpreters, as if they weren't qualified, they were often children of deaf adults. [Tim: mhmm] And so the language skills, say a deaf… a sign language user doing quantity surveying...
00:11:32 Megan
They needed somebody who had done a degree themselves [Tim: mhmm] to unpick the academic language, so that also became part of that degree program that by studying for a degree as an interpreter, you're developing the language, the knowledge and the expertise to be able to support the deaf students [Tim: mhmm] on their own degree courses.
00:11:52 Megan
So, it was kind of a, an entity that was this, this visual language center that was both support, training for interpreting, but also other courses for Deaf Studies.
00:12:04 Tim
So even in the beginning you were thinking about the specializations or the end goal for the interpreters not to be just a generalist interpreter, but yet see that they would be needed in many different fields.
00:12:19 Megan
Yeah, this was the advice we got from when we were looking at the interpreting degrees in Europe.
00:12:24 Tim
Mm-hmm.
00:12:25 Megan
But actually, having a sophistication of language was a really important thing. So, if someone was interpreting, say, Spanish to English for the European Parliament, [Tim: mmm] there was a sophistication of language that would be needed other than, say, tourist Spanish. [Tim: mhmm] So, we needed to know that for our interpreters they would have perhaps the everyday interpreting that was needed to support deaf people in the Community.
00:12:52 Tim
Mm-hmm.
00:12:52 Megan
But also to enable more deaf people to go to universities too, more deaf people to become professionals. They also had to have interpreters who could interpret and work it out at that level to enable them to become successful people in their own right. So, it was about that understanding that the language sophistication of language is what was needed. So, what it did do, not immediately, but people like Kristiaan, then we did projects looking at signs for scientific purposes. [Tim: hmm]
00:13:22 Megan
Because there wasn't a sort of set of standards because that language hadn't been used before. [Tim: mhmm] Then there were other signs that have been developed as we've gone on that really have expanded the vocabulary. And, and that's been really interesting to be able to say to deaf colleagues, “This is what this would mean. How might you sign it?” So, that the language is developed. [Tim: mhmm] But by having those language experts, what it meant was our staff room, we use sign language. I’m not the best signer, but it was the language of the office. [Tim: mhmm] Because actually if you were running a Russian department, that would be the language of that department.
00:14:05 Tim
Yeah.
00:14:06 Megan
And it enabled our deaf colleagues to be seen as, as the language experts, which I think was really, really important. One of them, John Hay, got a, I think an OBE, which is a, an award for services to deaf history and deaf education. [Tim: mhmm] And so for me, it was, it was also it meant that sign language was seen across the university, in not just in depth studies but across other situations and other ways, and that of course, then change other people's …attitudes.
00:14:37 Megan
But it was about accepting this is a language [Tim: mhmm] and the university never said, “No, it's not.” They just went, “OK. If you say it's a language, it's a language” [Tim lightly chuckles] and that, that led to other things. And we had a project where we had a teacher for the deaf who… she used to get quite emotional about how awful she felt.
00:14:57 Megan
That she had been as a teacher for the deaf, trying to force children to speak. [Tim: mmm] But what she did do was look at how a deaf person whose first language is British Sign language might grammatically construct English. [Tim: mhmm]
00:15:13 Megan
And what she noticed was sort of negations, you know, coming at the end of a sentence or things like the ending of words like walked or walking the Ed or the ING was often confused because you wouldn't sign that ending. You would actually be signing the action. So walked would be in the past.
00:15:33 Megan
Walking would be a continuous thing. [Tim: mhmm] So, again by ,by saying these, these are two different languages.
00:15:40 Megan
How English as a written language could be seen as a, an additional language for a deaf person, [Tim: mhmm] rather than being illiterate or poor literacy. It was second language use or additional language use.
00:15:55 Megan
So, the implications of having it seen as a language was much far reaching so that you weren't having those sort of the really bad attitudes that, you know, deaf people can't read and write well, they can read and write in their own language. But that doesn't necessarily translate to read, read and written English.
00:16:16 Megan
What can we do about it, but from a second languages as opposed to a literacy use. [Tim: mhmm]
00:16:24 Tim
That principle, that, that idea of the language use in the deaf community, did you see that kind of embed itself in the curriculum of the interpreting program, so that the students absorb that readily, or was there any misunderstanding of that?
00:16:43 Megan
No, I think that actually really helped that actually really helped them to understand also breaking down parts of a sign language that have meaning that weren’t just people wafting their hands around. [Tim: mhmm]
00:16:57 Megan
So, you know blowing out the cheeks, closing the eyes for greater than, so that actually that's part of the language and what has… why that has meaning. And as I say, the negation at the end of it going, “Well, no” will mean that something's gone from say happy to unhappy and actually be able to talk about language and language construction, so...
00:17:20 Megan
You know, I was always told that the, the sentence: A man walking over a bridge.
00:17:25 Megan
In English, the man comes first, then walking over and then the bridge.
00:17:31 Tim
Mhmm.
00:17:31 Megan
But in sign language you put the bridge first, then the man and the action. And in that action, you're, you're going over the bridge. You're not having to actually use the word to say walking over because they're, they're doing it. [Tim: yeah]
00:17:44 Megan
So, we just start to pick that and then go, “OK.” So once somebody's… when a deaf person who's a sign language user is writing English, is that then a visual grammar structure that they're using [Tim: mhmm] as opposed to just poor English?
00:18:00 Tim
Yeah, yeah.
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00:18:02 Tim
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00:18:19 Tim
It's not just about the idea and the concept and, and you obviously had wonderful support from the university to be able to get all of those “yeses in a row” to make things happen.
00:18:32 Tim
Where did you Find the faculty in those early years?
00:18:36 Megan
As I say, Sheila Grue, who was then man- manager of the Royal National Institute for Deaf People in Birmingham, said, “You want to go and talk to this guy Peter Llewellyn Jones. And Peter was a well-established interpreter. He was an expert in theater interpreting. [Tim: mhmm]
00:18:53 Megan
And he had contacts and he said, well, Durham University and Bristol University at the time were the only ones that have programs for Deaf Studies.
00:19:02 Megan
And they were great programs, but they were only funded through external funding, their success was based on the projects they did, and I didn't want that. [Tim: yeah]
00:19:10 Megan
Because I thought that means we're constantly chasing the money rather than actually setting up something that is going to make a, a difference. And I was very, I was very moved by it, when, when she said there was only 100 interpreters across the UK. And I just thought that's insane and none of them were qualified at, at degree level. I thought, how are deaf people being represented then? [Tim: yeah] You know, and that, that shocked me. So, Peter then brought in Kristiaan. And then Sheila also introduced us to then a number of deaf people who were the sign language experts. [Tim: mhmm]
00:19:45 Megan
And that… then we put together the program. I'm a professor of learning and teaching, so course design was something I was completely happy with. And as I say, once we'd been to Marie Haps, we looked at, you know, the first year being an orientation to getting people's skill levels to the right level. So, it's it was more than “tourist”, for want of a better word, language. It was a more sophisticated language. And then at year two, we would be concentrating on consecutive interpreting. [Tim: mhmm]
00:20:19 Megan
That would again really stretch people, but also give them that space and time to be able to, to get their language and interpreting cause it wasn't just obviously, it's not just sign language to English, it was that also English to sign.
00:20:34 Megan
So, a lot of the signs we would come across probably didn't exist. And then the final year was on simultaneous interpreting and then people could, if they wanted to, do so me specialisms.
00:20:46 Megan
So, we have people who are interested in court interpreting, you know, book for legal purposes, some who are interested in medical. Some wanted to stay in the university and do support deaf people in higher education, some really interested in theatre.
00:21:01 Megan
So, we were able to plan our program that would lead to when somebody graduated that they were efficient and understood the ethical considerations, the respect, the way of working, as well as having the language skills so that way of working, that being able to be an effective communicator, was something that we actually really, really, really wanted.
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00:21:32 Tim
So, Sarah, Becky, when you first started teaching, what was the curriculum like and what resources did you have to support it?
00:21:41 Sarah
I think to set context then the early 1993 program design was put together by Peter Llewellyn Jones, who was the first interpreting course (we use it interchangeably course, program) leader at Wolverhampton. And in those days the field and the profession was looking to and drawing from not only the practice expertise, but also from models being seen in Europe, America and spoken language interpreter training too. And also, in those days interpreter trainers and practitioners were often those of what was described as people of or with standing in the field.
00:22:24 Sarah
And they weren't necessarily or always qualified teachers too. So, Wolverhampton had, and continues to have strong deaf communities and myriads of connections externally. And the programme was always successful in underpinning the learning and teaching and assessment experienced by combining deaf community involvement or range of interpreter external visiting contributors for very specific disciplines and expertise, and also utilising the resources, facilities within a range of domain settings, for example such as law, health, nursing, teacher training, conference settings, social work, general linguistics and so on.
00:23:08 Sarah
So, all of that combined was what started to go into the formation of what was being taught within the program. And I came in as a visiting lecturer in 1994, so it was early days.
00:23:22 Sarah
Becky, you, you were teaching quite early on.
00:23:25 Becky
I joined the team in the year 2000. I graduated in 1998. I was a very young 21-year-old. I think I was probably one of the youngest to graduate because the course had generally had appealed to older students, so I was fresh faced, 21. I'd been signing since the age of 12.
00:23:46 Becky
So, I've kind of grown up in the deaf community. Umm, and, and I did two years out as an interpreter and then found myself in the teaching team, not, not the career I had planned. [laughter] So, yeah, so I joined in 2000.
00:24:01 Tim
Yeah. How did your perspective change from the mentality of a student to the mentality of teaching?
00:24:12 Becky
I had seen my language skills had grown quite considerably over those three years as, as being an undergrad. And I could see where the students needed to get to. So, when they arrived to us when it was the year one program and and I could see, right, I know what language skills I need to get them in to get them ready so that they were able to do the interpreting job or have the language skills to be able to do that interpreting job.
00:24:36 Becky
So, I could see through a very fresh pair of eyes of, of students and understand from and hearing perspective, what are the strategies I had learnt [Tim: mhmm] and taught myself and had observed in the deaf community that I had developed and then had to be able to put those in place for those students. So, my brain was really quite fresh in that language, um, honing and developing of the structures.
00:25:03 Becky
And so, I was thinking, “Right, how do I get what I have learnt and my knowledge and my skills through to into the interpreting som..uh, the, the language part of the interpreting?”
00:25:15 Tim
Yeah. So that influenced how you impacted the design of the curriculum in those early years then?
00:25:22 Becky
For the language part, yes, [Tim: yeah, yeah] and I hadn't necessarily trained as a language teacher. I did later on. [Tim: mhmm] I did my Master’s in language teaching materials developments.
00:25:33 Becky
But in those early years it was very much about what are the skills that I know, Sarah knows, that we have to develop [Tim: mhmm] that in those students to be able to be competent in their role as an interpreter when they graduated.
00:25:48 Tim
Yeah, yeah.
00:25:49 Sarah
And also at that time, our Sign Linguist who was Kristiaan Dekesel at that moment, at that time and…
00:25:57 Sarah
And he was innovating and pioneering, and the lot of what he was doing in terms of Sign Linguistics and his teaching. And, and he was also a qualified QTS government registered teacher. So, he came with a whole body of expertise and knowledge in, in teaching, teacher training, and pedagogy.
00:26:18 Sarah
So, and language development as well. So, we were very fortunate, you know, in the range of expertise of deaf and hearing colleagues we had in the team.
00:26:29 Sarah
And also, you know Becky's ability to bring it in from the students’ perspective having been quite close to that as well was a very, very good combination of complementary skills that really the students benefited from tremendously.
00:26:45 Becky
It was certainly a crash course in teaching. I think the, the many hours Kristiaan sat down with me and said right, this is what we do with language teaching. This is what needs to be done. This is what you need to look for. So, and you know and I'm still a language teacher today and a lot of those fundamental skills that Kristiaan taught me are still very much prevalent in my teaching language today.
00:27:07 Sarah
Because in the early days, that was one of the challenges.
00:27:12 Sarah
You know people were, as we said before, homegrown, very talented graduates from the programme. People who were known of standing like Peter Llewellyn Jones and deaf staff of that time. And nowadays, you know, it's by advertising.
00:27:27 Sarah
And you will have people coming forward with a whole range of qualifications and expertise.
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00:27:36 Tim
So, let me ask in the beginning, how did you find the students and how did you determine whether they were ready for the program?
00:27:45 Megan
Well…
00:27:46 Sarah
In terms of entry criteria, because obviously it's a university, entry to the program was via the university admissions criteria at the time [Tim: mhmm] and what the standards of entry were at that point. But I do recall we had the Council for the Advancement of Deaf People then, known as the CACDP.
00:28:07 Sarah
Had a British Sign Language Stage 2 qualification and I think I do recall that was one of the requirements [Tim: mhmm] for entry to the programme together with the necessary A level attainments. Although if a person was mature, which is considered to be 21 and over, you could have…
00:28:27 Sarah
You know, routes through, such as written essay or sufficient equivalent experience which would be assessed as potential entry to the program.
00:28:35 Tim
Many programs throughout the world, language is not necessarily a requirement, but you needed to have at least a basic level of BSL.
00:28:46 Sarah
Yes, and English, obviously, of course, yeah.
00:28:48 Tim
Well, obviously.
00:28:50 Becky
I also worked as an admissions tutor for a number of years when I was there, and when we looked at the mature student, the mature students would, would say, and they'd be, you know, they would be more than 21. [laughs] They, they would say, “I'm, I'm looking for a change. [Tim: mhmm] I want to do something different. I've got my level 2. And, but I haven't got… last time I did qualifications I was 16 or 17 or 18.” And so, we would give them a written assessment just to see how their written skills were and would give them an interview. And for me it was very much about what have they done with their life experience, what have they got because actually as an interpreter having that life experience is so important.
00:29:32 Becky
And we, you know, some of the students that, that graduated are the ones with straight A's from straight out of A levels. You know, they were the ones that had decided to have a career change. And with that, they brought a lot of past experience with them. And that was very beneficial for them when they were working in managerial settings. Although working in the bank settings because they had all that prime knowledge, but it also enabled them to share their experiences to the ones that were straight out of, out of, out of university.
00:30:04 Tim
Yeah, it's the life experience and, and the peer teaching that goes on between the students. It's, it's a lovely thing to have such diversity like that. I say that as a mature student myself when I started this career. [Sarah and Becky chuckling]
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00:30:24 Becky
It's finding the, the topics that we wanted to teach, and sometimes I would... I was a big swimmer, still swimmer, but a big swimmer back then, and I would go in the pool, and I would swim lengths and I would come up with modules. And I'd be like, I'd come back, “Sarah. I've… I've got an idea. [Tim chuckling] I've got something. What do you think about this?”
00:30:45 Becky
And so, you kind of need it. You were constantly thinking about. Right? What do they need? What do we need to put in place? What topic? What are the grammar features? And that was, that was something else that, umm, there wasn't a book on... What is the, what is the BSL grammar. We had the BSL dictionary which was just a collection of signs that actually Kristiaan was part of the, the project in designing the, the BSL dictionary.
00:31:10 Sarah
…at Durham University. Yeah. [Tim: hmm]
00:31:12 Becky
And we had that, but there wasn't any, um, Sutton-Spence and Woll, the, the book on the BSL linguistics and so there was a need to in order to teach language, you need to give the language learners rules. [Tim: mhmm]
00:31:29 Becky
There was at that time were very few resources that enabled us as language teachers to, to pick up and go, “Right. What, what are we going to teach rules or develop a knowledge base of rules so that the learners could, could acquire the language we had Brennan, we had Ducca, we had Aronoff, and Padden.
00:31:50 Becky
And, and, and so from that I was looking at what was available, but also what I was seeing in the Community and when a deaf person would say, “Oh well, like that interpreter.” I'd say, “OK, what? What's that interpreter doing that makes it really clear?” Or he would go, “Ohh. That's such a lovely language user.” OK. What makes them really clear? Because I want my students to be able to take on board those language features.
00:32:13 Becky
So, there's a lot of observation about what made a successful language user and then apply, and then link that in with the theory that was currently available at that time.
00:32:25 Tim
So, from your point of view as lecturers, what would you do differently now if you were starting over again?
00:32:34 Sarah
Looking back, we were operating in the context, within the context of that time, obviously. [Tim: mhmm] And of the HE regulatory landscape and educational landscape of the interpreting profession then. So, you know, we were housed within that dynamic and, and that, that structure of that time.
00:32:54 Sarah
And also, you know we've referred to the incredible creativity that it took to create those weekly teaching sessions and the content of the course as a whole from a resource base, not as advanced as it is today. I mean, I can remember the Learning Center, you know the library, and we would find an annotated bibliography and we'd be in there for hours, going through it and filling out on paper the request sheets to be able to get journal articles in to, you know, start building content and resource, [Tim chuckles] you know it was...
00:33:27 Sarah
It was also like daily, if not weekly feature of sitting in the library [Tim chuckles] with paper and pen trying to get journal articles in because we didn't have them electronically in those days.
00:33:36 Becky
Sarah, I've just had that traumatic experience flash back at me. Yes. [both laughing]
00:33:42 Sarah
It wasn't quite the Abacus, but it was definitely, you know, it was… It wasn't quite quill and ink. [All laughing]
00:33:49 Sarah
You know, but we weren't far off it. It felt at times. I, I think as well, we were looking wider at other disciplines for ideas and methods that we could adapt as appropriate. [Tim: mhmm] And, and a lot of what we did, whilst obviously informed by research where we could find it, was just as Becky's already said.
00:34:08 Sarah
It was sheer creativity and I think it never left our minds.
00:34:11 Sarah
Whether as Becky said you were swimming or whether you were gardening or whether you were hoovering and doing housework when you were going around the supermarket you were constantly looking for innovation that you could apply to teaching because also at that time probably the early 2000s was when we started to look at professional accreditation and mapping.
00:34:32 Sarah
And then the shape of the curriculum started to be a little bit more defined by the outcomes that professional bodies wanted to see.
00:34:41 Sarah
We had tremendous support from our external examiners at the time because those people you know having come from teaching themselves had been through the same journey, so it was a very interesting process of shared experience between, you know, teaching staff and external examiners and a very fruitful one fertile one where there could be a lot of sort of cross pollination on that.
00:35:04 Megan
And I think that level of innovation really drives change and propels innovation and standards forward at a really rapid pace. And that's so different today. You know this, there’s a wealth of resources as we've said available on the web. In those days, we were working with VHS tapes [Tim: mhmm] and limited sign language on TV, as Becky's already said.
00:35:27 Sarah
Now, I think if anybody's teaching today, and I think if you were to do it today, you may not put in quite the same hours as we were required to do and lose the same decades that we lost, you know, but in, you know, tremendous contribution towards people and life and a, a pioneering endeavour…
00:35:47 Sarah
But fundamentally the nuts and bolts of the job remain the same, and the commitments and time that goes with that, and it has to be remembered that teaching and research are not 9 to 5 occupations. [Tim: mhmm] So, you're always going to be giving, even if you, you arrive as a lecturer these days into an established program, and it's all there within VLE, such as Canvas or Moodle.
00:36:08 Sarah
You still have to, even if you pick up somebody else's materials, you still have to own it. And that takes time. You can't just pick up somebody else's work and deliver it [Tim chuckles] without understanding it.
00:36:19 Sarah
So, you know, I don't think an awful lot would change. We just probably wouldn't be walking to the Learning Center quite as much burning the midnight oil [Tim chuckles] on anotated bibliographies trying to get journal articles. Yeah, to build our resource, ‘cause we were building our resource for the Learning Center as well. [Tim: mmm, mmm]
00:36:36 Sarah
It was full on getting books and articles and a huge array of VHS resources so students could go in. We would record off television things that we thought were suitable and build that into the VHS resource.
00:36:49 Sarah
Our professional film studio technicians, you know, for educational purposes, would record any relevant television programs related to sign language interpreting and we would build that into our library. And students had a facility where they could go into sort of like a very comfortable, very soft sort of sofa lounge area…
00:37:09 Sarah
Where they could work on videos, lots of individual televisions, insert a VHS [Tim: mhmm] and work together as groups or individually, and just check these videos in and out and it worked really well for students. But we were hitting records on the VHS record around the clock to build that resource. [Tim chuckles]
00:37:26 Becky
And it certainly wasn't fun taking home 30 VHS tapes to mark. [Everyone bursts out laughing]
[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]
[ROCK EXIT MUSIC STARTS]
00:37:38 Tim
From this episode, the one key point we can take from these leaders is to have that clear vision. Have that goal that gives you the passion to do the best you can to give your most.
00:37:56 Tim
To serve our communities better and to pass that passion along to the next generation. This is only the first in these special reports to celebrate with Wolverhampton.
00:38:11 Tim
Stay tuned for next week to hear another part of our history, the history of our profession. Until then…
00:38:22 Tim
Keep calm, keep looking back and looking forward to interpreting. I'll see you next week. Take care now.
[ROCK EXIT MUSIC ENDS AT 00:39:09]