ABSTRACT
Competence and incompetence are constructs that emerge in the social milieu of everyday life. Individuals are continually making and revising judgments about each other's abilities as they interact. The flexible, situated view of competence conveyed by the research of the authors in this volume is a departure from the way that competence is usually thought about in the fields of communication disabilities and education. In the social constructivist view, competence is not a fixed mass, residing within an individual, or a fixed judgment, defined externally. Rather, it is variable, sensitive to what is going on in the here and now, and coconstructed by those present. Constructions of competence are tied to evaluations implicit in the communication of the participants as well as to explicit evaluations of how things are going.
The authors address the social construction of competence in a variety of situations: engaging in therapy for communication and other disorders, working and living with people with disabilities, speaking a second language, living with deafness, and giving and receiving instruction. Their studies focus on adults and children, including those with disabilities (aphasia, traumatic brain injury, augmentative systems users), as they go about managing their lives and identities. They examine the all-important context in which participants make competence judgments, assess the impact of implicit judgments and formal diagnoses, and look at the types of evaluations made during interaction.
This book makes an argument all helping professionals need to hear: institutional, clinical, and social practices promoting judgments must be changed to practices that are more positive and empowering.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|26 pages
Introduction
part 2|142 pages
Hidden Factors Influencing Judgments of Competence
chapter 3|34 pages
Slipping Through the Timestream
chapter 6|24 pages
Deaf Members and Nonmembers
part 3|120 pages
Diagnosis as Situated Practice
chapter 8|26 pages
Good Reasons for Bad Testing Performance
chapter 10|22 pages
Reports Written by Speech-Language Pathologists
chapter 12|32 pages
The Social Work of Diagnosis
part 4|73 pages
Intervention as Situated Practice