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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1090

Part of Session 108: Negotiating communicative practices in school (Other abstracts in this session)

“(Un)common ground” between teachers and parents in school consultations

Authors: Kotthoff, Helga
Submitted by: Kotthoff, Helga (Freiburg university, Germany)

The counseling literature on parent-teacher consultations in schools presents them as awkward situations. Kramer and Helsper (2000, 2002f.) see the school – from the family’s viewpoint – as increasingly an agent of status-reproduction, whereby the pressure on the family for achievement has never been more relevant. Social milieu, family life forms, habitus and school culture are more or less coherently interconnected. On the one hand, the only way for families to secure their status is through the agency of the school. On the other, the prototypically constructed middle class nuclear family is regarded as a support system for the school, although there are fewer and fewer families that conform to this prototype.

I approach stylistic matchings of teachers’ and parents’ talks within interactional sociolinguistics. What interests me most is how in their consultations teachers and parents negotiate a school and achievement oriented habitus and how the sorting of students is carried out. Our recordings of currently twelve parent-teacher consultations made at German elementary and special schools display different degrees in the communication of “common ground” (Gumperz 2006) between teachers and parents in regard to achievements, vocabularies of assessment, attitudes toward learning, children's behavior and other concerns. In the eight parent-teacher discussions from elementary schools it is especially evident how cautiously middle class parents (usually mothers) and teachers negotiate a shared, mildly critical perspective on the child. The participants carry on all their conversational activities from the perspective of assessing the child. I will discuss membership categorization practices that typify pupils (Mazeland/Berenst 2008) and help to sort them within the tripartite German school system. Middle class parents, for example, describe in detail how the child behaves when doing homework and how they themselves perceive its learning progress. Thereby they present a school-oriented parental identity and construct a competent self with at least the quality of a substitute teacher. All the parents of the students from special classes have a migration background, speak German at a medium level and are for several reasons less able to perform their home and themselves in the light of the school system.

Of special interest is the co-construction of all evaluation and assessment procedures focusing on the child (integrating strories about the child and negotiations of disagreement with the teacher).

References

Gumperz, John (2002): Sharing common ground. In: Inken Keim und Wilfried Schütte (eds.): Soziale Welten und kommunikative Stile. Tübingen: Narr, 47-57.

Kramer, Rolf-Torsten/Helsper, Werner (2000): Schülerinnen zwischen Familie und Schule. In: Krüher, H.H./Wenzel, H. (eds.): Schule zwischen Effektivität und sozialer Verantwortung. Opladen, 201-234.

Mazeland, Harrie/Berenst, Jan (2008): Sorting pupils in a report-card meeting: Categorization in a situated activity system. Text&Talk 28-1: 55-78