Criticizing another’s child: How teachers evaluate students during parent-teacher conferences
Abstract
As the principal occasion for establishing cooperation between family and school, the parent-teacher conference is crucial to the social and educational lives of children. But there is a problem: reports of parent-teacher conflict pervade extant literature. Previous studies do not, however, explain how conflict emerges in real time or how conflict is often avoided during confer- ences. This article examines a diverse corpus of video-recorded naturally oc- curring conferences to elucidate a structural preference organization operative during parent-teacher interaction that enables participants to fore- stall conflict. Focusing on teachers’ conduct around student-praise and student-criticism, this investigation demonstrates that teachers do extra inter- actional work when articulating student-criticism. This research explicates two of teachers’ most regular actions constituting this extra work: obfuscating responsibility for student-troubles by omitting explicit reference to the student, and routinizing student-troubles by invoking other comparable cases of that same trouble. Analysis illuminates teachers’ work to maintain solidarity with students, and thus parents.
Department
Communication
Publication Date
2-2016
Journal Title
Language in Society
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Pillet-Shore, Danielle. (2016). Criticizing another’s child: How teachers evaluate students during parent-teacher conferences. Language in Society, 45(1), 33-58.