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Constructions of Critical Incidents

We offer teachers and students coming to this set of narratives several ways to listen for critical incidents, but we suggest that listener-rhetors might begin with those, such as the ones we recount in the next section, that are named and constructed by the DALN contributors themselves. As such, these incidents are the products of the types of questions the interviewers ask (e.g., "Do you have a memory of...?" "Could you recount a situation where...?") and the storytelling practices of the contributors themselves. In these cases, the interview offers cues that structure the incident itself; as a result, multiple viewers would likely agree on what counts as the beginning, the middle, and the end of a given incident. In Higgins, Long, and Flower's rhetorical model of community literacy, these incidents are described as "problem narratives" when they reenact a situation that the rhetor found particularly troubling, demanding, or otherwise challenging (21). Because of the fine-grained detail, hidden logics, experiential knowledge, and contextual cues that they convey, such critical incidents ask listeners to question and test common sense or even personal pet theories against more operational dramatizations of public commonplaces. These readily apparent critical incidents, which often take the shape of anecdotal responses to interviewers' questions, ask listeners to interrogate and test common sense or even personal pet theories against more operational dramatizations of what access means in the lives of D/deaf learners.

Additionally, as we explore in greater detail below, the interviews also circulate other, less elaborated forms of situated knowledge, and the relevance of this knowledge to a potentially public issue of shared concern becomes especially apparent in relation to the entire collection. In this case, a critical incident is co-constructed by a listener-rhetor drawing illustrative details from across several interviews and embedding these details in a carefully constructed composite scenario whose truth-value would be its capacity to reflect the dynamics if not the specific details of a shared experience. For example, as we explain later in this chapter, the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Contributors consistently speak to the need for advocates who will intentionally provide them access to a technology, discourse, or social network. We later offer an example of how listener-rhetors might cull situated knowledge across a set of DALN interviews to form a composite critical incident dramatizing both this need as well as the intentional strategic efforts of parents - particularly mothers - to advocate for their deaf children.

Still other critical incidents emerge even more explicitly as the constructive product of the engaged listener. In such a situation, the listener is drawn to something perplexing about the experience that the contributor recounts. With the intent of honoring the complexity and nuances of that experience, a listener (say, a writing teacher preparing for a class discussion or a student researcher designing materials for an upcoming community dialogue) might deliberately transform loosely connected details and observations from an interview into a critical incident in an effort to draw other members of that local public into joint inquiry regarding the incident's implications for informed action.


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