At its most perplexing, situated knowledge invites listeners to co-construct the critical incident itself. Rather than seeing this as a colonizing move to stabilize meaning, we would argue that it is an act of metonymic listening on the order of what Krista Ratcliffe commends in her book Rhetorical Listening. The test of such a construct is whether it resonates for other readers/listeners, not unlike Michael Warner's understanding of how any public discourse works: "raise it up the flagpole and see who salutes" (114).
For example, in listening to Christopher Driscoll's interviews (part I, 17:30), Jennifer Clifton, one of the authors of this piece who taught middle school English for six years, found the following strands perplexing:

• Driscoll consistently noted resistance to reading and writing. He spoke of not knowing what the point was of writing/typing stories and of being forced to read.
• He recalled reading mystery books by R. L. Stein, the author of the popular Goosebumps series that Clifton's sixth-graders had enjoyed.
• Clifton recalled reading that "as the literature on literacy and deafness has often reported, when they are judged by Hearing English literacy standards, deaf high school seniors in the United States have an average reading ability at the 3.6 grade level" (Brueggemann ref. Lou 1988).
• Driscoll remembered reading the R. L. Stein books and signing to himself as he read before signing to his teacher to demonstrate his comprehension. He said his teacher would tell him that his understanding of the book was not what the book was about at all. Motivated by pizza as an incentive, Driscoll would re-read and re-sign until he ascertained the meaning to his teacher's satisfaction.
• Clifton recalled a scene in the memoir Train Go Sorry where teachers at a Deaf residential school had adapted a fairy tale for a senior class play, "spending more than twenty hours over a two-week period cutting, reordering sentences, and making the dialogue easier to translate into sign language" (Cohen 36-37), bearing witness to the difficulties of translating written English to ASL.

These strands construct a critical incident that wonders if Driscoll's resistance to reading and writing is related to difficulties of moving between English—the language of the dominant Discourse but a language he only has access to through text—and ASL—the language of his Primary Discourse. Other constructions are, of course, possible and perhaps more plausible, especially where they are better grounded in an Insider Discourse. That there are other possible constructions is, in part, the value of these constructed critical incidents. Far from being stable constructions, they invite testing; they move away from what Ratcliffe calls dysfunctional silence (88) and toward dialogue across difference.

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