Organizing Dialogue, Experience and Knowledge for Complex Problem-Solving

We Are Water: Walking the Howsatunnuck for the 7th Generation

by • May 30th, 2018

Grandmother Carole Bubar-Blodgett, explaining aspects of the 220-mile Prayer Walk of the Howsatunnuck River (Housatonic).

Just another crazy old lady, Carole Bubar-Blodgett talks a lot. Her stories are personal, about the lessons, teachings, and experiences she’s had walking the Good Red Road. Emotion runs through her, especially gratitude. Grandmother Carole was at Standing Rock, where she gifted an Eagle Staff to the youth of the Seventh Generation. “It was always […]

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Interpreting Eureka! The Possibilities of Plurilingualism

by • July 4th, 2017

Presented by co-author Jeffrey A Kappen in Copenhagen, Denmark at GEM&L 2017
“Revisiting Multilingualism at Work:
New Perspectives in Language-Sensitive Research in International Business”
GEM&L, Groupe d’Etudes Management &am…

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Immediacy, Heteroglossia and Calibration

by • August 8th, 2015

John Kellden invited me on July 14, 2015.

Immediacy Almost a month ago I received an email inviting me to join a Google+ group. I was happy to do so, thinking it was a personal invitation rather than one generated by an essentially anonymous algorithm. Arriving to the group (I went to check it out right away), the post that greeted me also […]

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Interpreting

by • October 4th, 2014

My dissertation is available through Scholarworks at the University of Massachusetts.     “Language is the medium and progenitor of discourse.” ~ Evangelina Holvino ~ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation began twenty-five years ago, long before I entered graduate school, with the Deaf and Hearing members of the Bilingual-Bicultural Committee at the Indiana School for the Deaf.  […]

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Being Meaningful: Everyday Practices of Resiliency

by • May 23rd, 2013

“We need to practice how we’ll play.”

Practicing how we’ll play means identifying gaps and weaknesses and moving to fill them. Washington DC Fire Chief John Sollers’ message is “We need to practice how we’ll play.” His message is aimed at fellow firefighters and professional first responders who have not yet been in a situation of needing to communicate with and understand a Deaf person who uses American Sign Language. Practicing how we’ll play means learning how to work with ASL interpreters to recognize differences in meaning and co-construct mutual understanding without erasing those differences or artificially forcing a meaning that is not actually understood. Learning how to communicate with the involvement of a third party is a skill that transfers to all kinds of communication situations, including cross-discipline communication in English as well as intercultural communication with non-English speakers of all kinds.

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Communication Theory and Simultaneous Interpreting

by • November 4th, 2012

Where is your meaning? Communicating with someone who is fluent in a language different from yours through a simultaneous interpreter is a special practice of intercultural communication. An online course from the Learning Lab for Resiliency will use a think tank approach to exploring the intersection of theory with practice. Information and registration instructions are […]

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Sign Language Interpreting and Emergency Management

by • November 2nd, 2012

Language for the Eyes It has only taken decades of advocacy and complaints to the FCC, FEMA, and State governments for public officials to respond to Deaf Americans who rely on sign language for communication. The outburst of public response to professional simultaneous interpretation of a signed language during Hurricane Sandy reveals an astonishing range of […]

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Practice How You’ll Play: Lessons from the Era of Neil Armstrong

by • August 26th, 2012

Dad watched the time as we drove some winding high mountain highway in the Colorado Rockies. He had purchased a black-and-white television that could be powered from the cigarette lighter to bring along just for this trip. As the target time approached, he pulled onto the shoulder, and sent my brother and I to wag down passers-by and invite them to watch the moon walk with us.

Or maybe it was the moon launch. I don’t remember clearly. The picture was grainy, only a few cars drove by and none of the drivers thought it was important to stop. (I can’t recall if there were any passengers; I don’t recall any consultations.) I think we weirded them out. I know that I felt a little embarrassed, what were we doing, this strange behavior out of the norm of everything I’d ever seen?

I was six years old, just trying to grasp what was happening and why it mattered so much.

How did they get the camera there?! That required foresight, pre-planning and imagination: visionary (imagining things in the category of “we don’t know what we don’t know”) and apocalyptic (“things could go bad”). I feel a sense of nostalgia for that kind of epic

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Practice How You’ll Play: Lessons from the Era of Neil Armstrong

by • August 26th, 2012

Dad watched the time as we drove some winding high mountain highway in the Colorado Rockies. He had purchased a black-and-white television that could be powered from the cigarette lighter to bring along just for this trip. As the target time approached, he pulled onto the shoulder, and sent my brother and I to wag […]

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sharp curves and time-out-of-time (TOOT!)

by • August 14th, 2012

Sometimes, sharp conversational curves feel like precipitous cliffs. There is what I do, sometimes, which is to say something spontaneously about something that is going on within the context of a group that is within the realm of things most people have been trained not to say. This is more than a sharp curve, and it calls upon whoever is involved to exercise a deeper level of social resilience. Mental agility has to be combined with emotional savvy, too.

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