A School Story, Not a Student Story: The Dyslexic Diagnosis Paradigm in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Representations of dyslexia have a history of educational and literary scholarship primarily concerned with how dynamic characters with learning disabilities are and if they are positively portrayed. This article uses narrative theory to analyze how diagnosis operates on a structural level to create what I call the dyslexic diagnosis paradigm. Examining school stories featuring characters with dyslexia published between 2007 and 2020, I demonstrate how this paradigm functions through a structural closure of struggle, diagnosis and accommodations, and a psychological closure consisting of shame, declaration, and acceptance within these novels. Variations or polytypes of this narrative are also common within this corpus which maintain the psychological closure of shame, declaration, and acceptance present within the prototypical narrative. While some disability counternarratives or dyslexic persistence narratives nuance the school story, the dyslexic diagnosis paradigm ultimately remains prevalent and upholds the medical model of disability within the educational system, promoting the flawed status quo of disability rather than asking readers to question the validity of the systems which enforce them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".