EMQ » April–June 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 2
By Andrew Tlucek
“There are three types of people in Haiti. Those who are leaving, those who are trying to leave, and those who can’t leave.” During my first year of ministry in the country, I did not believe the words of my Haitian colleague. Ten years later, this statement has been proven to be true. Third world and developing nations, in general, do not provide driven individuals with opportunities for advancement. This includes limitations in academic, business, and personal growth opportunities.[1] Therefore, these individuals are emigrating out of their country of origin to “greener pastures.” This creates a huge vacuum within the education systems of these nations. For example, only twenty percent of the current teachers within the primary and secondary educational systems of Haiti currently have formal training as instructors.[2]
This lack of educational expertise within the nation implies two problems for newly formed educational ministries. First, budgetary constraints, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, will limit their ability to recruit Christ following instructors with formal training, and they will need to seek out developmental talents. Sadly, this means there will be a period when a professional gap within the staff exists until these new employees catch up. Fortunately, this can be remedied through several temporary solutions. In this article, a resolution used by Maranatha Children’s Ministries will be explored.
The Solution
By bringing temporary instructors in from the United States and pairing them with interpreters, leaders at Maranatha Children’s ministries have been able to provide students in their primary grade school, and education camps, with quality education until their teachers in training have become fully competent. While this approach to international education is not new, the complexities involved in having a foreign teacher and native interpreter instruct students effectively are slowly becoming a science through education, communication, and interpretation research. Therefore, the hope is to provide short-term and long-term missionaries with enough information necessary to replicate the method our ministry has found for any situation that requires more qualified personnel than available within community being served.
Challenges with the Foreign Teacher/Interpreter Model
Before providing the roadmap of effectively implementing this method, it is important to understand the complexity of interpreting contextually accurate information from one language to another while maintaining the focus of young students. The foreign teacher, the most knowledgeable in the subject, knows how to provide the information within the context of their own culture. However, they are not prepared to present it in a fashion that will be fully comprehended by their current audience.[3] Because of this, consecutive interpreters are not only required to have communicative skills, but they must have a solid cultural understanding of their audience and the teacher they are working with to effectively transfer the information.[4]
It is exceedingly rare for an interpreter to fully grasp the culture of the foreign instructor just as it is difficult for the foreign instructor to fully understand the culture of the students in the classroom. Therefore, there will unlikely be a completely accurate transference of information from the instructor to the students without any preliminary and recurring communication. In addition to trying to resolve intercultural and contextual challenges, learning needs to be engaging for students to retain the information they are receiving.[5] Therefore, interpreters and instructors must work with one another to avoid monotonous tone and low energy. This can be difficult especially when the team is navigating a topic they have not presented before.
Solutions for These Challenges
To address these challenges, preliminary actions must be employed by all parties within the ministry, relationships must be fostered within each teaching cell and team, and intentional teaching tactics need to be adopted. However, it should be noted that each practitioners’ strengths in the classroom differ and students positively respond to different tactics. The recommended instructional tactics should be utilized by the instructor, and interpreter, when it is seen as an asset to effectively reaching their students.
Preliminary Actions
To effectively spring this model into action, administrators should begin by creating glossaries for administrative documents, course curricula, schedules, and ministry buzz words in each language to accommodate both the interpreter and the foreign instructor.[6] This will ensure the entire faculty has access to the same information in their native tongue. After having the material readily available in each stakeholder’s language, a crash course on the foreign teacher / interpreter model should be developed and presented to the faculty. This crash course should provide all faculty members with clear standards of what is effective instruction, interpretation, and teamwork.
For example, a clear standard in interpretation is making sure each team strives to open the “five windows of translation.”[7] (They are as follows: “linguistic, cultural, literary, political or ideological, functionalist, and digital.”[8]) Furthermore, this crash course should provide all attendees with how a day looks with the new method implemented, as well as how the procedures affect the overarching aspects of the program. By presenting the faculty with this information before implementing the plan, there will be an opportunity for metacognition to occur which has been proven to help interpreters and teachers understand and meet expectations and goals.[9]
Finally, if time and flexibility permit, administrators should consider doing a week-long dress rehearsal of the instructional method before performing it live with students. The leaders at Maranatha Children’s Ministries have found conducting one has allowed them to determine which interpreter and foreign instructor match best with one another. Furthermore, it allows teachers and interpreters to get comfortable with the process, iron out any unsavory issues, and receive valuable feedback before performing before students in the upcoming semester.
As foreign instructors prepare to teach their new students, it is vitally important they go out and take the time to walk through the community they will soon influence. They should strive to get to know students, parents, and community leaders. By doing so, they will be able to gather ideas of what is important and culturally relevant just as Paul did when he walked through Athens and discovered the people worshipped many gods and even worshipped an unknown god.
After determining what is culturally relevant, it would be advisable for the instructor to conduct a personal debrief with their interpreter, friends, and fellow missionaries to grasp each person’s unique perspective. The instructor should journal their observations and these responses to compare and contrast their perceptions with fellow expatriates who have lived in the country longer than them, those who have grown up in the country, and those that may be from a different nation altogether. This time of reflection will help them better grasp how to develop lesson plans, determine what is culturally appropriate, and what parent expectations are for their students. Finally, foreign instructors must go out of their way to develop rapport with their teaching counterpart and collaborate with them on lesson plans. If there is not a healthy professional relationship, the instruction they intend to provide to the students is doomed before it begins.
Similarly, interpreters should strive to sharpen their technical skills before the school semester, or ministry program, begins. However, they will need to be provided with a glossary that provides common and unique words in the course material they will be teaching. Furthermore, leaders should provide each interpreter with a teacher’s copy of the curriculum so they can gain the overall theme and content their counterpart will be teaching from. By having each of these materials with the preset of expectations from the leadership, interpreters will know what to study, memorize, and retain to streamline the learning process for students in the upcoming semester.[10] Most importantly, translators should strive to understand their counterpart and the culture from which they come from. By better understanding the cultural context, idioms, and ideologies they carry, the interpreter will be able to perform a more thorough transference of the information provided to him, or her, by the instructor.
Instructor and Interpreter Relationships
As previously mentioned, the most important aspect of this teaching method is the relationship between the instructor and interpreter. It is the battery of learning in the classroom, and when it is running efficiently, transference of information is in sync and students are fully engaged. However, one minuscule lapse in the transference process can cause students to disengage. Therefore, active communication is needed. Instructors will need to explain their intent as they utilize body language and change the pitch of their voice. Without effective transference of these queues’ students may be left confused or miss out on an emphatic statement.[11]
Furthermore, interpreters will need to provide feedback from students, and themselves, by explaining their findings or seeking clarification for students. For example, the interpreter may discover a literal translation of a word does not truly represent the idea the instructor is hoping to portray to the students. Or, they may find students do not understand something due to their socioeconomic status, or education level, and they may need a simpler, or more detailed, explanation from the instructor.[12]
Teaching Tactics
Since there are intercultural barriers between the instructor, the interpreter, and the students, it is important for the teaching team to make locally responsive design choices that make the curriculum, classroom setting, and biblical teaching relevant for the students.[13] Jesus was masterful at this. He understood the local people and would utilize relevant examples around the people and integrate them into the lessons he was teaching. Furthermore, he would select speaking venues that would help reinforce the points he was trying to make. Comparably, the teaching team should discuss how their classrooms should be set up to be culturally appropriate and meaningful for the learning of the students coming to learn. They should also utilize social practice in the classroom to get real-time feedback from students as they navigate these topics, and others, in the classroom to determine how things can be refined and tuned for even greater effectiveness.
Time Management
Before discussing additional tactics, it is important to highlight time management. When a teaching team is required to translate everything spoken by the instructor, it can potentially double the time necessary to teach a lesson especially if the topic is being presented for the first time.[14] Therefore, the team should strive to become efficient in communication as they work together and be cognizant of the time they have. This is especially true when introducing new concepts and learning tools. However, the labor to introduce them may be extremely useful in future lessons. One example of this is teaching students a bilingual song that helps them identify different body parts in their native tongue and English.
Body Language
While instructing students within this model’s context, the instructor and interpreter should utilize body language in a natural and clear manner that incites thought in students, provides them with additional information, and is constructive.[15] If possible, the teaching team should try to get students out of their seats to exaggerate the body language they saw to help them retain the information they have been learning in the class.
Maranatha’s Developed Tools
Interactive teaching tools or tactics have been extremely helpful for Maranatha Children’s Ministries’ teaching cells. For example, Bible teachers have had students dress up and act out Bible stories as they read the Bible story to students. English teachers have collaborated with the music teacher to make a song in English and Haitian Creole that taught each week’s Bible lesson and English vocabulary. Science teachers have developed games to teach the concepts of momentum and molecular bonding. In fact, these examples have been so successful that ministry representatives see students play these games, sing the songs, and recount the Bible stories when going out into the community. Therefore, teaching cells within this model should be encouraged to innovate and try methods that build around their strengths.
Conclusion
As third world educational ministries work through the process of finding teachable employees and developing their skill into high quality teachers, there are few solutions available for providing temporary quality education. Fortunately, support can be found by creating teaching teams that consist of foreign instructors and competent interpreters. However, careful preliminary planning and administrative adaption need to take place to ensure each person fully understands their job and is a team player. Furthermore, the members of each teaching team must openly communicate, and have a healthy working relationship, to provide students with the highest quality of learning by making sure the material is culturally and contextually relevant. To encourage student engagement, these teaching teams ought to collaborate amongst their peers to develop creative and engaging teaching tools and tactics that invoke student imagination and participation.
Andrew Tlucek has been a part-time missionary serving in the country of Haiti for the last fifteen years while pursuing a PhD in higher education. During this time, he has spent nine years as an education administrator, training faculty, interns, and short-term employees on how to effectively instruct and reach students for Jesus within Maranatha Children’s Ministries’ English Camp program.
NOTES
[1] D. Ilic & M. Milosavljevic, “Brain drain: Propulsive factors and consequences” in Journal of Economic Development, Environment and People 6, no. 4 (2018); 29, doi: 10.26458/jedep.v6i4.567.
[2] Nedgine Paul Deroly, “Haiti’s education system is broken … by design,” Bright, January 11, 2019, https://brightthemag.com/haitis-education-system-is-broken-by-design-children-poverty-equity-1b97982f8a.
[3] Samuel S. David, Mark B. Pacheco, and Robert T. Jiménez, “Designing Translingual Pedagogies: Exploring Pedagogical Translation through a Classroom Teaching Experiment,” Cognition and Instruction 37, no. 2 (April 2019): 252–275, https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2019.1580283.
[4] David, Pacheco, and Jiménez, “Designing Translingual Pedagogies,” 268–269.
[5] David, Pacheco, and Jiménez, “Designing Translingual Pedagogies,” 271–272.
[6] Serra Acar and Patricia M. Blasco, “Guidelines for Collaborating with Interpreters in Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education,” Young Exceptional Children 21, no. 3 (2018): 170–184, https://doi.org/10.1177/1096250616674516.
[7] Wensheng Deng, “Teaching Translation: A House with Windows Facing Different Directions” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 10, no. 1 (2020): 55–60, http://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1001.08.
[8] Deng, “Teaching Translation,” 56–59.
[9] Acar and Blasco, “Guidelines for Collaborating,” 170–184. Roza Ayupova, “Teaching Oral Consecutive Interpretation” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 5, no. 7 (2016): 163–167, http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.7p.163.
[10] Elena Marinova, Nadezda Rabkina, Marina Ryabova, and Olga Valko, “Lingua-Didactic Aspects of Teaching Mining Vocabulary to Mining Engineers” E3S Web of Conferences 41 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/20184104040.
[11] Xiaoling Yang, “The Use of Body Language in English Teaching,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 7, no. 12 (2017): 1333, https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0712.23.
[12] Acar and Blasco, “Guidelines for Collaborating, 56–59.
[13] David, Pacheco, and Jiménez, “Designing Translingual Pedagogies,” 252–275.
[14] Alaattin Parlakkılıc, “Intercultural Teaching through Translation: An Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Literacy Course Case in Afghanistan” Intercultural Education 27, no. 6 (2016): 587–599, https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2016.1262191.
[15] Yang, “Body Language,” 1333–1336.
