Problems of children’s involvement in interpreter-mediated meetings between their teachers and their parents

This paper focuses on six interpreter-mediated interactions between teachers, migrant parents, and their children in Italian primary schools, a topic that has not yet been widely examined in the literature on public service interpreting. The analysis draws on audio-recorded interpreter-mediated interactions collected in Italy during a European Horizon 2020 project. The paper shows the barriers that exist in engaging children in these interactions. The difficulties observed are varied and more challenging to overcome than those hindering parental involvement. While Childhood Studies shows that the important enhancement of children’s agency in social contexts needs particular non-hierarchical structures of interaction, in the analysed interpreter-mediated interactions the mutual positioning of teachers, parents and mediators does not allow this enhancement. Thus, the involved children stay silent, they provide minimal responses when addressed, they show feelings of distress, and their few initiatives are not supported by the other participants. The paper shows the reasons for the failure of both teachers’ actions and mediators’ coordination to involve children and support their exercise of agency.