A Longitudinal and Critical Counter-Narrative of Literacy Learning for a Child Diagnosed with Aspergers

• In Event: Critical Counter-Narratives as Transformative Praxis in Urban Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Objectives
This fifteen-year longitudinal case study follows James, a Chinese American child diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, from preschool through his senior year of high school. Based on an extensive multimodal data set, we document how parents, teachers, and researchers contributed to the construction of a counter narrative that provided spaces for James to thrive despite early and ongoing challenges in school. James ultimately defied all predictions becoming a National Merit Scholar and being accepted to a major university.

Theoretical Framework
This study contributes to discussions of counter-narrative (e.g., Lee, 2025; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) by revealing roles played by others in re-interpreting and re-writing narratives over time, enabling possibilities that may have seemed impossible. This argument draws on Lemke’s (2000) discussion of timescales, which highlights how people make meaning as they draw on experiences and understandings gleaned from across multiple dimensions of time. Timescale analysis reveals how participants recursively/selectively draw on experiences as they repeatedly return to some stories while neglecting/forgetting others. People simultaneously operate within multiple timescales including historical, familial, and ongoing timescales involving experiences in the relative present. A timescales model is used to explore the longitudinal co-construction of a counter-narrative that propelled James forward.

Methods and Data Sources
Across this fifteen-year case study, researchers collected observations, interviews, and student-created artifacts. During home and school visits, members of the research team attended to ongoing activities, literacy practices, and the texts James and his parents read, wrote, and discussed. Twice each year, research team members observed James in his classroom during literacy instruction, and interviewed parents, students, family members, and teachers. Our semi-structured interviews focused on school experiences, literacy achievement, language and literacy practices, and comparisons of James’ school experiences with those of his parents, a generation ago in China. We analyzed student-created artifacts including self-portraits; photographs of home, school, and neighborhood; and maps of neighborhoods, schools, and homes.
Research team members coded interviews and field notes using a combination of a priori and grounded codes to explore James’ experiences relative to literacy, identity, and schooling. We draw on coded data that reveals how historical, familial, and ongoing timescales affected and informed the co-construction by parents, teachers, and researchers of a counter-narrative that challenged earlier childhood narratives.

Findings
The synergetic co-constructed alternative narrative discussed in this paper draws on timescale analysis across three dimensions of time. First, learning and knowing are located within and historical familial timescales involving religious discrimination in China and the family’s move the USA. Second, timescales are invoked in how James experienced days, weeks, semesters, and years of schooling. His Asperger diagnosis brought challenges related to the pace of schooling and assignment deadlines. Finally, the willingness of teachers and parents to rework and reimagine temporal parameters for success allowed James to be successful - completing assignments and engaging in school tasks in accordance with alternative timelines that supported the construction of an alternative counter-narrative.

Scholarly Significance
This counternarrative provides clues for how children deemed unsuccessful can be reimagined as not only capable but gifted.

Author

• Catherine F. Compton-Lilly, University of South Carolina