The ways in which she was positioned often shifted according to changing circumstances or according to whether she was being viewed through the lens of cultural, medical, or educational assumptions. When I heard of the different rationalizations given for these diagnoses, I was amazed by the fungibility of social categories. Ada's diagnoses had heavy implications for what teachers believed she could learn or acquire 1 day. I was struck by the mismatch between, on the one hand, the all-encompassing, deficit labels that her educators used to describe Ada, and on the other, the character who emerged in my field notes as a multi-faceted individual. I learned of Ada's story during a 4-month period of ethnographic field research in her classroom, where I was able to observe her in many different situations. The reading party, as narrated by the TA, must have been a decisive moment that made visible to those around her a different kind of Ada: one that her special needs labels seemed to have buried.
Not only did she step out of the special needs framework within which she was viewed as incapable of learning literacy skills at the same time, she also came to experience a powerful combination of steady, collaborative practice and genuine encouragement. In these classes Ada was considered through the very narrow lens of her diagnoses, and tasks were repetitive and context-free, whereas reading with Damla seemed to offer Ada a different approach to learning a new skill. During all her years of primary education, Ada had also attended pull-out sessions with the school's special educator and three other classmates. In the TA's telling, the girl, led by her good friend and classmate Damla, had practiced reading over regular afternoon sessions throughout the fourth grade and into the fifth. However, a somewhat heroic counter-narrative to Ada's “deficiency” emerged, recounted by an emotional TA who had witnessed her progress. This way, Ada's presumed illiteracy was viewed by her teachers as an expected outcome of their failed efforts to teach her reading and writing skills. Rumors around her family and ethnic customs thickened to become common knowledge that trickled down into rationalizations for the likelihood of her cognitive delay. At the intersection of racialized and abelist assumptions, some of her educators evinced a tendency to equate Ada's cultural background with a predisposition to intellectual weakness. Throughout her schooling career, Ada's educators had positioned her as “other” in the sense that her name and appearance marked her as non-German and that she was diagnosed as intellectually disabled through special needs labeling. Ada was the daughter of a Lebanese family who attended primary education at an inclusive school in a large German city. “We thought she would never learn to,” the teaching assistant (TA) remembered before narrating the incident of the reading party.
When Ada attended the fourth grade, she still could not read or write.
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment.Bulletin of the National Association of Student Anthropologists.
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