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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Deaf Wellness Center Receives "Demand-Control Schema" Dissemination
Grant

The University of Rochester's Deaf Wellness Center (DWC) has received a
half-million dollar grant from the US Department of Education's Fund for
the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) to disseminate a
program of educational reforms for sign language interpreter preparation
programs (IPPs). These reforms, known collectively as the
"Demand-Control Schema for Interpreting Work" were developed by UR
Faculty Associate Robyn Dean, CI/CT, MA, and by the FIPSE grant
principal investigator, Robert Pollard, PhD, Associate Professor of
Psychiatry (Psychology).

This is Dean and Pollard's second FIPSE grant. The first one funded
implementation of their demand-control schema approach at the University
of Tennessee's IPP in Knoxville. The marked success of that project led
to this dissemination grant award. Dr. Gary Skolits, head of the
evaluation team for the University of Tennessee project stated, "of all
the projects I have evaluated over the years, none have ever come close
to achieving these results." The new FIPSE grant funds a three year
effort where Dean and Pollard's education methods will be used at 15
IPPs around the US.

The demand-control schema, based in occupational health research but
applied in unique ways to the interpreting field, stresses that sign
language interpreting is a "practice profession" such as medicine or law
enforcement, rather than a "technical profession" where bilingual skills
are sufficient for interpreters to be effective. Dean and Pollard's
methods teach unique situational analysis skills to interpreters, where
a wide variety of job assignment factors ("demands") are carefully
considered in relation to the varied resources ("controls") at the
interpreter's disposal to respond effectively to job demands. The
approach also facilitates interpreter learning about real world service
settings through a unique "observation-supervision" methodology.

The new FIPSE dissemination project will culminate in the publication of
a text book and DVD containing demand-control schema teaching resources.
The 15 IPP sites participating in this effort will serve as models for
other IPPs wishing to incorporate the popular demand-control schema into
their curriculum.



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