Transcript
“Hello. My name is Dr. Patrick Boudreault. I’m the CASLI board’s vice president of testing.
The CASLI board has seen the open letter which was posted to social media by CSD and other organizations. We at CASLI appreciate the community taking the time to share their concerns. We believe communication is important. We are working on a response to the open letter and the expressed concerns, in collaboration with RID, to be released by August 11, as requested in the letter.
I want to explain a bit about the history regarding the establishment of CASLI. RID established CASLI, with CASLI being subsidiary to RID, and tasking CASLI with two responsibilities. One, administer current exams. Two, develop exams to replace the exams that have been used for two of RID’s certifications: the NIC (National Interpreting Certification) and the CDI (Certified Deaf Interpreter).
One part of exam development is creating and conducting a Job Task Analysis (JTA), which looks at the industry and its requisite standards for developing testing criteria based on current and emerging needs of the consumers and practitioners in the field. Data is collected to contribute toward new exams, supporting the reliability and validity of the test being developed. A JTA was conducted for the NIC, and it is now available on the CASLI website. It happened to be uploaded on the CASLI website on July 10, which coincidentally, and unbeknownst to us at the time, was the same day the open letter was released. There was no connection between the JTA Report and the open letter; it just happened that the open letter was posted online the same day the JTA Report was released on our website.
In a spirit of open communication, CASLI has been working diligently for the past several months, planning, modifying, and improving, resulting in a plan that we submitted to the RID board on June 19. They considered the proposal and approved our proposed plan during the RID Board meeting on July 2. This timing and their positive response gave us the opportunity to start our communication by reaching out directly and in person to two different audiences at two conferences: 1) the Deaf Interpreting Conference, in Pennsylvania last week, and 2) the RID conference this week in Salt Lake City. I went to the Deaf Interpreting Conference where I conducted a lengthy round table discussion with RID, presenting and explaining our plan. We got feedback from audience participants, which we learned from. Now, with the RID conference in SLC, the CASLI president, Dr. Miako Villanueva, is attending and doing the same thing: sharing, listening, and gathering input. After both processes, we will analyze the input we received and continue to share our plan more widely, including in our response to the community open letter, clarifying our plan and other happenings.
Thank you.”