In Hermes’ shoes: Labelling and diagnosing children as acts of translation

Language games and grand narratives

Over its course of development as a (scientific) discipline, psychology has been developing a discourse of its own, as has every subcategory within psychology. We are reminded by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953/2001) that meaning within a discourse is highly determined by how language is used and does not exist in a neutral physical world. Language and discourse are connected at their foundation in that all discourse is constructed with language. The manipulation of language impacts how people interact and respond. On the one hand, language and discourse both shape and delineate the culture in which they are working. However, on the other hand, it is culture that provides much of the meaning for the language that happens within discourse.

In his later works, Wittgenstein argues that meaning is highly determined by how language is used and does not exist in a neutral physical world. In this light, he develops the idea of “language-games.” Language is not a unified, fixed, and stable entity, but it is “part of an activity, or form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, p. 23). It is a game between two or more people, where their interaction leads to language and meaning. Wittgenstein gives the example of two builders working: if builder A asks for a hammer from builder B there must be some sort of language understanding between the two. Builder B brings the hammer, which he has learnt to call hammer (see Wittgenstein, 1953/2001). If we want to participate in these games, it is important that we learn the rules that govern each language-game. The learning of these rules becomes very important if one wants to participate in this game, so if one wants to participate in psychological discourse, one needs to be fluent in its language.

In this way we can say that the language of educational psychology is not directly accessible to all, unless its rules are learned and practised. There are established guardians of such a language, such as the British Psychological Society and American Psychological Association, in order to maintain, develop, and protect this language and its users. One needs to be introduced and inducted into this language in order to learn the rules of these language-games. These systems are mutual and self-perpetuating, as these rules, guardians, and users of the language depend on each other for their existence and livelihood.

The EP is someone who has learned the rules of some of the basic and fundamental language-games that constitute educational psychology and is engaged in practising these rules. EPs are expected to fulfil requirements in order to be part of the language games. Thus, the EP gives to the service providers in the way of conforming, and in return the EP is given acceptance, their recognition of the EP as a professional with “expert” status (Attard et al., 2016a, p. 969). EP practices reinforce the rules of a particular game, but it must be said (and emphasised in the conclusion) that EPs are in a position of altering and developing these rules while in the process of playing these games, and our anecdotes show that they develop them consciously.

EPs are also constantly learning rules of other language-games in order to start playing in these games. There are new concepts, new ideas, which are incorporated into EP practice, and the EP needs to keep up (recent examples that come to mind are mindfulness, Early Language In Play Settings [E-LiPs], Adverse Childhood Experiences [ACES]). We mention these as we want to emphasise the collective nature of the language-games. Language-games are not individual for Wittgenstein. There is no place for a private individual language-game (indeed it does not even qualify as a game!). Language-games are social phenomena, where the collective is fundamental. The collective often assumes some form of order and democracy.

While emphasising the collective nature of language games, we want to mark the rise of what Nikolas Rose (1985) argues was a focus on “individual psychology.” This occurred as a result of the urbanisation processes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, accompanied by compulsory primary schooling that was created to respond to the development of the workforce needed to supply factories. The following example, taken from Erica Burman (2008), shows how “individual psychology” seemed to be the answer to the question of selection. Burman draws from Rudolf Pinter’s 1933 chapter in A Handbook of Child Psychology, where Pinter argues that:

since feeblemindedness is not a disease that we can hope to cure, what methods are to be adopted to lessen the enormous burden that feeblemindedness places on the community? The only procedures seem to be training, segregation and sterilization. (Pinter, 1933, p. 837, as cited in Burman, 2008, p. 19)

Burman argues that “‘individual psychology’ emerged to fulfil this role of classification and surveillance. The psychological individual was a highly specified and studied entity whose mental qualities and development were understood by virtue of comparison with the general population” (2008, pp. 19–20). It is in this light that we see the role of the EP as a translator, that is, in translating a particular child into an individual psychological child within a general population that is psychologised. The translation is necessary to make this individualised psychologised discourse accessible, especially because some languages are more dominant than others and the lack of translation would mean that someone is left out. The EP is expected to translate children into a collective psychologised language, where the child’s sameness to and difference from “children” becomes the primary focus and concern:

So knowledge of the individual and the general went hand in hand: each required the other, and each was defined in terms of the other. The division of the mad from the sane, the criminal from the lawful and educable from the ineducable, shifted from moral-political criteria to the equally judgemental, but scientific, evaluation of mental testing. (Burman, 2008, p. 20)

David Armstrong (1983, 1995) argues that the child’s uniqueness (individuality) is not only read from a “composition which summed the unique features of all children” (1983, p. 396), but that normal growth assumes the possibility of abnormal growth. Abnormality became a relative phenomenon of degree and therefore, proximity and distance became an important part of this language. This collectiveness within this language-game organises everything and tends to form established ideas about the world—a homogeneous thinking and making sense of the world. The language-game thus becomes a “big story” that seems all-encompassing.

Following from Wittgenstein’s work, Jean-Francoise Lyotard (1984) developed the concept of grand narrative. The grand narrative “claims to be the story that can reveal the meaning of all stories, be it the weakness or the progress of mankind” (Readings, 1991, p. 63). It is “a global or totalising cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience” (Stephens & McCallum, 1998, p. 17). Its legitimisation comes from establishing itself through the power that others (such as the state, universities, etc.) invest in it, and in turn such institutions or bodies become visible through their presence within the grand narrative. Grand narratives are a “conceptual instrument of representation” (p. 17) in the sense that everything is read, interpreted, and understood in relation to the production and transmission of meaning created by the grand narrative. They do not allow for any other possible interpretation or understanding of knowledge besides the dominant one (see Mercieca & Mercieca, 2012), so that it is difficult, yet not impossible, to escape.

What are the foundations of these educational psychology grand narratives? This question is important to ask as our argument rests on the assumption that the EP’s role is that of translating the particular child to common and universal language-games where all children seem to fit. We return to the words of Erica Burman who engages in deconstructing one of the foundational language-games within psychology, that of developmental psychology:

The normal child, the ideal type, distilled from the comparative scores of age-graded populations, is therefore a fiction or myth. No individual or real child lies at its basis. It is an abstraction, a fantasy, a fiction, a production of the testing apparatus that incorporates, that constructs the child, by virtue of its gaze. This production, rather than description, of the child arose from the technologies of photography by which hundreds of children doing the same tasks could be juxtaposed, compared and synthesised into a single scale of measurement, from one-way mirrors through which children could be observed, and of psychometric tests. The production and regulation of children extended beyond testing environments to the settings by which children were cared for and instructed… All child behaviour is available to be documented, becomes normalised into child development, and child development comes to inform the mundane minutiae of childcare. (2008, p. 23)

Acts of translation

The discourses of success and inclusivity within education have built on the individualised psychology language-game, and now have also become a grand narrative in their own right. These two are expected to fit comfortably next to each other. Everything is measured, read, and interpreted and we build our lives and the lives of the schools on such understandings. Everything needs to be made to fit the grand narrative. What does not fit needs to be altered so that it “plays nicely” according to the rules of the game. The following narrative could be an example of how everything needs to be made to fit and function within a language-game:

One of the EP authors received a phone call from a nursery coordinator for inclusion. In a nice way, she told the EP that the administrators suggested that she revise and amend her report on Steven, a three-year-old boy. Apologetically, the inclusion coordinator told the EP that her report was not conclusive and “does not say anything” at all about Steven. The diagnosis was “not clear and direct.” If the report was not amended, it would be almost impossible for Steven to get any support in class. The EP rebutted by saying that she had observed Steven at home and school, spoke with the parents and early-years educators and had written an extensive narrative account of all this in her report along with her recommendations, clearly giving reasons why a label was not warranted at this early stage and what intervention needed to be put in place. The intervention was, in fact, that Steven be involved in class and expected to participate in the same activities as his peers, seeing that the hearing impairment which had limited his development had now been rectified. The EP explained to the inclusion coordinator that she was very reluctant to label Steven, given that he was only three years old, and strongly felt that, given the usual consideration and care expected in an early-years class, Steven was highly likely to succeed without specialised support. She did not feel that Steven needed specialised support yet, indeed that it would do more harm than good.

It is assumed here that EPs can capture the child’s abilities and disabilities and transform these into something that can be read by all. Here the EP is constructed as having more to say than the nursery educators. She has a language that somehow they lack—if they had this language, then why would they need the EP? In fact, in the above narrative, the EP’s submitted report and recommendations in narrative style are viewed as insufficient, and they want more out of her. They live the narratives every day. So is this all the EP can give? There is a desire for more from the EP—to follow Burman’s idea, she needs more detailed “technologies of photography” expressed in her report from what is already available in the nursery. She is asked to “revise and amend her report” in order for her contribution to be viewed as valid. They need the EP to translate the child into a language that they do not have direct access to. It almost seems incongruous; the nursery inclusion coordinator wants the EP to give something that is within a different language-game. Hers is the role to translate their narratives into the psychologised labelling discourse that they believe will guarantee the support Steven needs. Here the EP is caught in a contradiction: she has translated their views and concerns about Steven to a psychologised discourse that she believes serves the necessity of explaining his needs for support. She has purposefully not given a label as she is painfully aware of the immediate and long-term repercussions that would do a disservice to Steven. She tries to transgress translating the child by avoiding labelling, yet she is caught in this double-bind. Notwithstanding her “expertise,” she is painfully aware that if she does not adhere to the rules of the language game the nursery staff subscribes to, there is a risk that they will not listen to her language, thus divesting her of any possibility of supporting the child and family in that context. The mother unknowingly corroborated this by confiding in the EP that the school advised her to seek another EP who would be willing to write in the required language. This was an ethical and political bind for the EP, whether to choose to fight it out and risk exposing the child to the displeasure of nursery staff who felt they faced his difficulties unsupported, or for the EP to play according to their rules and do an injustice to this child by applying an unwarranted label to ensure his support.

These EP language games have developed over time and there are historical reasons for the nature of their formation. The original need for the domination of the psychological grand narrative in education may no longer be strong, as educational psychology seems to have its place in education, but it nonetheless still provides the parameters of EP work and professional lives. The heart of these language games that form grand narratives is not what they are, but, as Wittgenstein argued, is how they are used—it is their usage that constitutes them. Therefore, knowledge, social practices, power relations, constructions of bodies, minds, and lives are all at work at the same time (see Weedon, 1987, p. 108) and it is in them and through them that a language is formed and forms, is developed and develops. In Steven’s story, the insistence of the school staff that the EP report should include terms that they felt gave them the tools to make their claim for support, is a reflection of how the grand narrative is totalising, and how it works. In particular, it shows how in its relationship, functions, and practices, it is establishing itself and all those participating in this game, thus giving it more strength as a grand narrative.

The following was taken from Suniana Attard’s (2012) study on EP report-writing. One of her interviewees captured the ethical and political double-bind aptly:

You have to play the game … [otherwise] … the children are penalized, because they’re not given the support … to a certain extent you have to play it … and try and change it at the same time, but it’s difficult because if you want to change it they’re not going to put you in a position to be able to change it. (p. 59)

The open nature of EP work, the fact that they work within systems, makes their position one where they have to function within the structure which in fact gives them their authority and value. At the same time the EP is aware of these parameters and in her work can acknowledge and try to transgress the restrictions and limitations imposed by such a structure.

The translations that we as EPs are involved in include translating from (a) spoken (parental interviews, carers interviews, teacher interviews, child interviews) to spoken (formal procedural meetings); (b) from un/structured observations to spoken (formal meetings) or written; (c) from the spoken (parental interviews, care giver interviews, teachers) to the written (notes or full narrative); and (d) test scores translated into t-scores so that they can be compared against a mean, compared to results of other tests, and so that age equivalents can be elicited. We have norms coming from standardisations of these tests. And we can compare the results of one test to those of another. We have a clear idea of what level of ability, achievement, and attainment is expected at a certain age, and, when results deviate from the mean, we have clear ideas of what pathologies cause such deviation.

All these acts involve a double act of translation: on the one hand, children’s lives, contexts, and their being are translated into an individual psychological child within a general (fictitious) child population that is psychologised. On the other hand, there is a second act of translation: this individual psychological child is translated back to the child itself, his family, and educators (therefore, the non-psychological world). Both acts of translation assume a linear process where one leads, almost automatically, into the other, although the languages on either side of the translation do not hold equal status.

The EP’s translation seems to be the medium through which the experience of the nursery staff reaches the notice of the resource-allocating structure—without the EP their experience is “before or beyond language” (Crépon, 2006, p. 300). The EP’s translation is the recognised currency. Derrida (1985b) argues that such language “defines itself as the fixation of a certain concept and project of translation” (p. 120). Therefore, if a child or context cannot be made to fit, then the problem must lie with the process of translation and, as can be noted from the vignette, with the translator (in our case the EP), but not with the language itself:

It is small wonder that when regulating bodies provide a proforma which psychologists need to fill instead of writing a full report, this is met with relief by the psychologists. This relief is intermingled with indignation [as] … such practice reduces the psychologist to a technicist practitioner. Here, psychologists realise that what makes them uncomfortable and anxious … is in fact what makes them professionals. The information which is required makes psychologists feel that their professional voice is not being given importance. (Attard, Mercieca, & Mercieca, 2016b, p. 62)

The following excerpt from the Guidelines to MATSEC Examination Access Arrangements 2015 (University of Malta, 2014) clearly outlines the expectations made of the translator. The EP, as a translator, in reading these guidelines (and this is only a small section out of many pages), finds herself needing to play by the rules of this game in order to help the child. But it is only through the words and actions listed below that the EP is permitted to translate the child.

Candidates will qualify for EXTRA TIME if:

(a) Their standardised score on the English Reading Comprehension Test is <85 (1 SD below the mean) or <16th Percentile Rank; or

(b) Their standardised score on the English Spelling Test is <85 (1 SD below the mean) or <16th Percentile Rank; or

(c) If a candidate did not qualify on the basis of (a) or (b), but the assessor considers that the candidate may need extra time due to slow processing, the assessor should assess the candidate additionally on the NARA II Reading Rate and the PATOSS or HEDDERLY speed of writing test. Candidates will qualify for extra time if their score on the speed of handwriting test (e.g. PATOSS or HEDDERLY) is at 13wpm or below and, in addition, their score on the NARA II Reading Rate is <10.00 years. (p. 42)

Linked to the above excerpt, one of the authors recalls an experience that she had with the above Examination Board following submission of a report for a child to have support during his exams:

I carried out a number of assessments for adolescents who were going to sit for their MATSEC examinations. Most of them were children who resided in residential homes and thus carried a heavy baggage of pain that incised their lives and left an impact on their behaviour at school and their lives in general. I had written about their history of trauma and specifying that this may have in itself been one of the reasons for the adolescent’s lack of focus. A few weeks after submitting my applications, I received an e-mail saying that a number of applications for access arrangements on behalf of my students had been processed. The e-mail drew my attention to some incomplete applications in terms of the assessment battery requested. It said that in Michael’s application the Connors assessment was not administered and the handwriting speed (Patoss) was also not administered. The e-mail said: “Handwriting speed (Patoss) not administered. If this falls below 13 words per minute, then student would be eligible for extra time as the score on NARA Accuracy is below 10 years. (S. Bugeja, personal communication, August 2017)

The message to the EP is that she did not adhere to the guidelines. Although she made considerable effort to present a convincing argument regarding this child’s need for support, she wrote it in a language that the Board, as a body allocating support in exams, could not “read.” She risks her client not being supported.

The proformas allow the EPs to translate children almost automatically. While some EPs may believe in this automatic process, others feel uncomfortable and constrained by the bodies and structures (parents, educators, and educational institutions, and at times children themselves) that adopt this assumption and constantly apply it to EPs. We have to keep in mind that these actors have varying levels of engagement with some of the psychological language-games. For example, teachers are introduced to the developmental psychology language-game through their initial teacher educational courses or through Continuous Professional Development (CPD). This “secularisation” of particular educational psychological language games does have its benefits. However, a mere introduction to a language game does not equip teachers (for example) with the awareness of the domination of this language-game over actors, of the responsibility of the legacy of this language, nor does it lend itself to the ability to question such a legacy (see Standish, 2010, p. 363). Indeed, it sometimes leads to “wrong conclusions” made about children, when constructions about a child are formed according to this limited involvement in particular language games. We have endless examples from our practice of children being labelled by teachers as having ADHD based on their views of isolated behaviours of “not sitting down” and “running around.” The following is an account by one of the authors on some experiences:

I recently was involved in the case a very young girl called Rosie who attends child care daily from 8am to 6pm and was deemed by the care givers as having ADHD. Not taking into account that Rosie’s waking life was in the child care centre, the care givers expected her to act as though in a formal educational context for the 10 hours she spent there every day. Rosie’s parents, who said that they needed the child care because of their work commitments, asked me to “assess for ADHD.” In another case, I received a call from an irate parent who accused me of letting his son, Joe, down because I had not written in my report that his child “is ADHD.” He had been told that neither the school nor the statementing board could provide the boy with any additional support. In disbelief, I asked this father to give me some time so that I could go through my report to recall what I had written the year before. When going through the report I recalled that I had drawn upon my observations to write about the boy’s strengths and possible areas of improvement. I remembered that my intent had been to help his teachers understand that since he had had many absences from nursery school that year, for various reasons, Joe had still not settled and needed time and care. It would not have been right to diagnose him with ADHD, with such a strong environmental cause of his behaviour. Nonetheless, I was told that neglecting to apply the label (albeit still in the second year of nursery school), and furthermore not carrying out a psychometric assessment, was depriving Joe and his family from the assistance that I had clearly stated that he required. (S. Bugeja, personal communication, August, 2017)

In the above, the EP’s report-writing was deemed useless as she seemed to have strayed from the expected framework of formal assessment and diagnosis. The EP had done this consciously, being uncomfortable in the automaticity that seemed to be implied in the conversations. Although, as was also found in Attard’s (2012) study, EPs welcome the move to making translations more linear and automatic, at the same time they appreciate that it is complex and often uncertain.

I felt intense anger towards certain regulating boards whose regulations I felt were incompatible with what I considered to be the “best” way of writing about children. Admittedly, I could not help but judge some professionals whom I felt were writing reports in a manner which catered heavily to the criteria set by such bodies and whom as a result of adhering to the regulations, I felt were in a way betraying the children and family with whom they work … I have also come to appreciate the need for the criteria. That said, I continue to believe that there is a need to continue questioning regulations that are in place as well as what is written in reports; questioning what is being said in reports about children, and what is being neglected. (Attard, 2012, pp. 4–5)

Some of these systems (that EPs participated in creating) do not allow for the complexity that EPs feel constitutes the young person’s story—they instead have to present in a straightforward, easy, and linear manner. For Derrida, this would be an act of violence both to the translator and the translation itself. From its origin, Derrida’s work has been “haunted” by the concept of translation. His argument has always been to see how translation is the play of the “impossible possibility” rather than a linear, automatic process where it is believed that the child is mirrored. He wants to move away from the binary opposites that make up most of our understanding of the world (in our case how to understand children). Derrida argues that there is a “metaphysics of presence” that gives a text (for Derrida a text is not just a written document, but can be an episode from one’s life, a situation, a story, circumstance, policy, therefore a child’s life and context) its unity, where presence was granted the privilege of truth. He claims that over the years Western thinking has oriented itself around key concepts that are considered both to be the starting point and the centre as the truth or value of a particular system in question, giving it the characteristic of stability and permanence (see Wolfreys, 1998, p. 198). Therefore, Derrida argues that the history of Western philosophy has always been a series of privileged terms. These terms however work in binaries, for example: Good/Bad, Presence/Absence, Same/Different, Man/Woman, Reason/Madness, Truth/Falsehood, Normal/Abnormal, Able/Disabled. The term on the left (Good, Presence, Same…) has always been thought of in terms of presence and every effort is made to locate it as the foundation, an absolute beginning and centre from which everything originated and can be mastered. The term on the left is always given priority over the term on the right (Bad, Women, Disabled …) and is conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the term on the right is considered to be inferior to the first and is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even “parasitic.” This is the “hierarchical axiology” of metaphysics; here the term on the left is designated as “pure, simple, normal, standard, self-sufficient, and self-identical, in order then [emphasis added] to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, and so on” (Biesta, 2001, p. 38). It follows that the terms on the left are established as borders, and this therefore implies some form of closure. A limit has been established and therefore one has to think outside that closure. Borders are caught between this inside/outside. It is not the territory outside that keeps the inside, but the other way around. For Derrida, closures are circular in that they auto-represent, justify themselves, master their own limits, assume self-knowledge; and regulate the traffic that moves in and out of their territory. These closures reinforce and emphasise what is outside of them. Thus, the outside is established as non-closure. However, Derrida wants to think about the “impossible”—that is, seeing how the term on the right can question, shake, or deconstruct the term on the left when it is made present in our way of thinking. What is this impossible possibility that Derrida is arguing for?

It is referring to the complexity in these acts of translations. As EPs, we are caught in this complexity. We have written above about the constraints of the rules of the language game. Yet if a text is not translated, the original text does not survive, in the sense that it is not made accessible to others. It is not understood and made tangible, and therefore these others cannot interact with this child. As EPs, we all received those phone calls asking us to intervene in a situation with a particular child because the parents, teachers, the school administrators cannot make sense of the child. Our job is to translate the child into a language that is understood by these others, as otherwise the child would be lost. One of the EP authors recounts, “The school feels it can do nothing—services are not given if the child is not diagnosed. It’s almost as though they sit back and wait until the behaviour aggravates to the point that the child will perform as the school constructs him” (S. Bugeja, personal communication, August 2017).

Educational psychologists furthermore know that while having to translate the child in order to access services to help the child, the very creation of a translation that they engage with seems to make the (original) child invisible to them. The very act aimed to reduce distance between the child and the adults around that child paradoxically serves to increase that distance. The creation of the translation reinforces the need for the translation and all the actors are reinforced in their roles and their engagements. It is made more difficult for them to access the child in any way other than through the translation that they demand. As Derrida writes, the act of translation, while necessary to enable access to the original text, inevitably destroys the text, but also at the same time forbids access to it, leaving it untouched in its reserve (see Derrida, 1981, p. 99).

It is in this way that the EP’s acts of translation are impossible possibilities: on the one hand, there is a call and a need to translate the child, while knowing on the other hand that the act of translation itself nullifies the child: “In a sense nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible” (Derrida, 1998, p. 57). It is an imperfect translation—it is good, but not good enough. The translation echoes the mother (original) tongue, but it is not it. We should not lull ourselves into thinking that our translation mirrors the original child. As Derrida (1985a) argues, acts of translation create a sort of idiom, rather than a perfect language. The definition of idiom is, “a construction or expression of one language whose parts correspond to elements in another language but whose total structure or meaning is not matched in the same way in the second language” (Idiom, 2018).

In the act of translation, the particular child is always placed in relation to the language. This is not an equal relation, “the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather a violent hierarchy” (Derrida, 2004, p. 41). Language takes over the particular child, and Derrida highlights that this is done in a violent way. In the process of translating the child into such languages, the child is lost within this language, and is othered to herself.

This is the aporetic (see Derrida, 1993) nature of translation: through the process of translation, the child will be “made heard” and is placed within a system of thoughts and actions. In a way, the child is made to survive with the schooling/social systems; but on the other hand, the translation subsumes the child (and often the family) into a major language they all seem to understand, capture, and fix. Aporia is “that impossibility of ever ‘capturing all’ in a system, method or law” (Attard et al., 2016b, p. 58). The following quote from Burbules (2000) captures this tension in more concrete terms:

Aporia is an experience that affects us on many levels at once: we feel discomfort, we doubt ourselves. We may ask, “What do I do?”, “What do I say?”, “What’s wrong with me?” An aporia is a crisis of choice, of action and identity, and not only of belief. When I have too many choices, or no choices, I don’t have a choice; I’m stuck. I don’t know how to go on. (p. 173)

We are caught in this. The issue is not whether or not to translate the child. That is superseded—translations are taking place and will continue to take place. Labelling and diagnoses are constantly taking place within educational discourses that have been taken over by market, capital, performative, and globalised narratives (such as the OECD and international assessments like PISA). The issue is about the limits, borders, and ends of this translation. For Derrida, it is “the limits of truth” that are at stake here and how “truth” is “precisely limited, finite, and confined within its borders” (1993, p. 1). As Anaya Roy (2015) states:

the point of Derrida’s analysis is not to find safe passage across such borders and limits but instead to consider the aporias that haunt the attempt to pass and trespass. Put another way, Derrida (1993, p. 9) is keenly attuned to what he describes as the “essential incompleteness of translating.” (p. 8)

There is always “more” to the child than the label and diagnosis we give, there is always “more” that escapes us. What we give is incomplete. This is why the idea of translation appealed to us and resonated with processes in our practice. If EPs feel translations are incomplete and try to convey this incompleteness to others, this would disabuse everyone from the illusion that the whole child has been captured by the label or diagnosis. Thus, it would allow everyone to be open to what in the child does not fit comfortably in the diagnosis, hence preventing the risks involved in pigeonholing the child. The incompleteness haunts us as we revisit and reappraise our involvement. The issue becomes a moral one, invades our attitudes and our being in our work.

This attention towards the other guards against the risk of forgetting that this is incomplete and that our acts of translation resemble an idiom rather than a perfect language. We draw upon Smith’s (2007) suggestion that acknowledging this incompleteness may be the only way in which we can work within the structures, that at least we live with the tension of wanting to practise in one way while necessarily following a prescribed route:

Acknowledgement is the articulating and what might be called the truly experiencing of what – others’ pain, their very personhood, our own embodiedness and morality – in our experience demands to be felt and expressed but what at the same time we may try to suppress. (Smith, 2008, p. 186)

On occasion, this acknowledgement can take the form of a paper that critiques the grand narrative. Biesta (2009) calls on us to witness this incompleteness as a way of balancing the desire to resist uncertainty and closure. This incompleteness is not a negative. On the contrary, it is that which gives possibility to the child and to us as EPs. It is in this light that Derrida (1996) suggests that we are careful and vigilant in our attempts at translation.

Following Derrida, we have tried to show a shift from our assumptions of translating the child into a major language to a focus on the processes of incompleteness when translating. Elsewhere we have called for this shift to be offered to psychologists in training, so that they can become “professionals who work in schools and educational institutions in a way that allows both them to ‘think otherwise’ and in a way that invites others to do so as well” (Attard et al., 2016b, p. 65).

This shifts the focus from the child as fitting, often comfortably, within a major language, to the aporetic nature of the process of translating, therefore opening up the process for constant vigilance and carefulness on the part of those involved in such a process, acknowledging and giving witness to the incompleteness of this process.

Conclusion

EPs acknowledge these issues of complexity and uncertainty (Mercieca, 2011) within translation and know themselves as being caught in the aporia. This does not mean that the psychologist does not translate and label/diagnose children. In fact, the psychologist has learnt how to live with the seemingly automatic translation, to live in the discomfort coming from an understanding that this process is limited and incomplete. Does this affect children? If we had to do away with complexity and give a yes or no answer, we would be contradicting the whole idea of this paper. Although in the scenario mentioned earlier the EP does end up reporting whether Michael’s handwriting speed matches the requirements written in the impersonal email sent to her by the examination board, her way of being caught in aporia can bring about openings in such translations, albeit perhaps not in the report, but perhaps in her being with the child and his family.

Similarly, when we were discussing these ideas prior to writing the paper, one of the educational psychologists mentioned that she was currently delaying, almost subconsciously, but with some degree of intent, the writing of a report about Rosie mentioned above. We feel that this delay could be seen as aporia, and the choice lies with the EP whether to ignore or to engage with it. It is in this light that the EP can bring about changes in children’s lives.

Hermes, in Greek mythology, is considered a god of transitions and boundaries. He is described as quick and cunning, moving freely between the worlds of the mortal and divine. He is also portrayed as an emissary and messenger of the gods. We can say that Hermes is the process of translation. Within the scope of this paper we see that the educational psychologist is very similar to Hermes—moving between language games and grand narratives. It is in the EP’s very nature to be able to cross borders and transit between different worlds, bringing these worlds together, with the possibility of opening the linear nature of diagnosis and labelling, challenging the automaticity of these assumptions and processes, and acknowledging the incompleteness of such processes, with the possibility of making an impact towards change.