Depersonalizing troubles in institutional interaction
Routinizing in parent–teacher conferences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.23557Keywords:
institutional interaction, criticism, parent-teacher conferences, conversation analysis, student troubles/problems, epistemicsAbstract
This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent–teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student’s trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of ‘routinizing’ – citing first-hand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to pre-empt parent/caregiver resistance to their student assessments/evaluations. This research thus reveals how routinizing licenses teachers’ authority vis-à-vis the focal student’s trouble by making salient the epistemic basis for their claims.
References
Antaki, C. & Bloch, S. (2020). Advising without personalising: How a helpline may satisfy callers without giving medical advice beyond its remit. Sociology of Health & Illness, 42(5), 1202–1219. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13088
Baker, C. & Keogh, J. (1995). Accounting for achievement in parent–teacher interviews. Human Studies, 18(2/3), 263–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01323213
Caronia, L. (2022). Reported speech in problem telling: Doing epistemic and moral work in parent–teacher conferences. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 16(2), 135–159. https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.18940
Caronia, L. & Dalledonne Vandini, C. (2019). Assessing a (gifted) child in parent–teacher conference: Participants’ resources to pursue (and resist) a no-problem trajectory. Language and Dialogue, 9(1), 125–148. https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00035.car
Drew, P. & Heritage, J. (eds). (1992). Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge University Press.
Erickson, F. & Shultz, J. (1982). The Counselor as Gatekeeper: Social Interactions in Interviews. Academic Press.
Goffman, E. (1981). Footing. In E. Goffman (ed.), Forms of Talk (pp. 124–159). University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100
Heritage, J. (1984a). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Polity Press.
Heritage, J. (1984b). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (eds), Structures of Social Action (pp. 299–345). Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (1997). Conversation analysis and institutional talk: Analyzing data. In D. Silverman (ed.), Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice (pp. 161–182). Sage.
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 30–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646685
Heritage, J. & Sefi, S. (1992). Dilemmas of advice: Aspects of the delivery and reception of advice in interactions between Health Visitors and first-time mothers. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (eds), Talk at Work (pp. 359–417). Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, G. (1979). A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/declination. In G. Psathas (ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Irvington Publishers.
Kim, H. R. S. & Kuroshima, S. (2013). Turn beginnings in interaction: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 267–273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.08.026
Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (2003). The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other. Ballantine Books.
Lerner, G. H. (2013). On the place of hesitating in delicate formulations: A turn-constructional infrastructure for collaborative indiscretion. In J. Sidnell, M. Hayashi & G. Raymond (eds), Conversational Repair and Human Understanding. Cambridge University Press.
MaClure, M. & Walker, B. M. (2000). Disenchanted evenings: The social organization of talk in parent–teacher consultations in UK secondary schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(1), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425690095135
Maynard, D. W. (2013). Defensive mechanisms: I-mean-prefaced utterances in complaint and other conversational sequences. In J. Sidnell, M. Hayashi & G.Raymond (eds), Conversational Repair and Human Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pillet, D. (2001). ‘Doing pretty well’: How teachers manage the interactional environment of unfavorable student evaluation in parent–teacher conferences. Master’s thesis, University of California–Los Angeles.
Pillet-Shore, D. (2003). Doing ‘okay’: On the multiple metrics of an assessment. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(3), 285–319. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3603_03
Pillet-Shore, D. (2012). The problems with praise in parent–teacher interaction. Communication Monographs, 79(2), 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2012.672998
Pillet-Shore, D. (2015a). Being a ‘good parent’ in parent–teacher conferences. Journal of Communication, 65(2), 373–395. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12146
Pillet-Shore, D. (2015b). Complaints. In K. Tracy, C. Ilie & T. Sandel (eds), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi145
Pillet-Shore, D. (2016). Criticizing another’s child: How teachers evaluate students during parent–teacher conferences. Language in Society, 45(1), 33–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404515000809
Pillet-Shore, D. (2017). Preference organization. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.132
Pillet-Shore, D. (2018). Arriving: Expanding the personal state sequence. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(3), 232–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1485225
Pillet-Shore, D. (2021). When to make the sensory social: Registering in face-to-face openings, Symbolic Interaction, 44(1), 10–39. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.481
Pollner, M. (1974). Mundane reasoning. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 4, 35–54. www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/mundane-reasoning/docview/1300111944/se-2?accountid=14512
Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: ‘Limited access’ as a ‘fishing’ device. Sociological Inquiry, 50, 186–198. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00020.x
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. C. Heritage (eds), Structures of Social Action (pp. 57–101). Cambridge University Press.
Raymond, G. & Heritage, J. (2006). The epistemics of social relations: Owning grandchildren. Language in Society, 35, 677–705. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404506060325
Sacks, H. (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. Gumperz & D.Hymes (eds), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (pp. 325–345). Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-623550-0.50008-2
Schegloff, E. A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of ‘Uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In D. Tannen (ed.), Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Georgetown University Press.
Schegloff, E. A. (1988). Goffman and the analysis of conversation. In P. Drew & A. J. Wootton (eds), Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order (pp. 89–135). Polity Press.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007a). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007b). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 462–482. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.07.007
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G. & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53(2), 361–382. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.1977.0041
Stivers, T., Mondada, L. & Steensig, J. (2011). Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In T. Stivers, L. Mondada & J. Steensig (eds), The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation (pp. 3–24). Cambridge University Press.
Sudnow, D. (1967). Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying. Prentice Hall.
Svinhufvud, K., Voutilainenm L., & Weiste, E. (2017). Normalizing in student counseling: Counselors’ responses to students’ problem descriptions. Discourse Studies, 19(2), 196–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617691704
Timmermans, S. & Tavory, I. (2020). Racist encounters: A pragmatist semiotic analysis of interaction. Sociological Theory, 38(4), 295–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275120961414
Waegel, W. B. (1981). Case routinization in investigative police work. Social Problems, 28(3), 263–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/800302
Waller, W. (1932). The Sociology of Teaching. John Wiley & Sons.
Waring, H. Z. (2017). Going general as a resource for doing advising in post-observation conferences in teacher training. Journal of Pragmatics, 110, 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.01.009
