"And You? What Do You Think Then?" Taking Care of Thought and Reasoning in Intellectual Disability.

Fatigante et al. present a case study of the interactions between a target adolescent, Davide, with a diagnosis of mild intellectual disability, and adult therapists in assessment and therapeutic contexts. The study assumes a Deweyan approach to reflective thinking and analyses how the child’s reasoning abilities display in conversation. Their analyses show that the adult-child discourse in these settings 1) enhances the child’s argumentative abilities and 2) solicits the child to engage in a more positive consideration of how his mind works. The conclusions target the importance of providing children and adolescents with intellectual disability – who less likely engage in rich and complex social interaction – opportunities to participate in conversation, as the natural site for developing sense-making tools and coping with self-ascription of incompetence.