Exploring self-efficacy beliefs in symbiotic collaboration with students: an action research project

Abstract

This paper presents a participatory action research project in which teacher-researchers, student-researchers and student-subjects collaborated on a research project in a working-group format to investigate constructs related to the translator’s psychological ‘self’. The pedagogical approach adopted for managing the working group, based on social constructivist principles and a view of knowledge development as an emergent, collaborative process, was found to have boosted the students’ self-efficacy beliefs regarding themselves as researchers, as the results of a focus group analysis revealed. Moreover, through the symbiotic collaboration between teachers and students in the working group, a preliminary two-section questionnaire for measuring students’ self-perceptions as translators was validated over the course of the project, thus enhancing the value of this research tool for studying learners’ self-efficacy beliefs. A key focus of this chapter will be on a shift in emphasis from ‘translator training’ and ‘training the translator trainer’ towards ‘translator education’ and ‘educating the translator educator’.