“That Teacher Takes Everything Badly”: Discursively Reframing Non-Normative Behaviors in Therapy Sessions

While some scholars have emphasized the culturally contingent nature of disabilities, far less research has attended to the situated and discursive contexts within which those with disabilities and their communities make relevant their own understandings and representations of disability. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, in this article we report findings generated from the analysis of audio and video data from therapy sessions and waiting room conversations among children with autism labels, their parents and therapists. We share a detailed analysis from one therapy session, using selected excerpts to illustrate the patterns noted across the corpus of data. We drew upon a discursive psychology framework informed by critical notions of disability, poststructural understandings of discourse, and certain aspects of conversation analysis to explore ways in which therapists reframed non-normative behaviors. We found that, rather than orienting to their work as “fixing” the child, therapists supported the child in making sense of how others (outsiders) might interpret their words and bodies. We illustrate how participants discursively worked to co-construct an account for how problematic behaviors may have been “misunderstood.” We argue that practitioners and others should consider ways in which they might reorient to and reinterpret children whose communication and behaviors fall outside of the norm.