Disenchanted Evenings: The social organization of talk in parent-teacher consultations in UK secondary schools

Abstract

Parent-teacher consultations represent something of a 'black hole' in our understanding of educational practices. This study, based on audio-recordings, examines the structure and the fine detail of these brief encounters. We identify some similarities with doctor-patient consultations. Teachers are accorded the right to give an uninterrupted 'diagnosis'; and they maintain knowledge differentials through their use of specialist vocabularies and professional registers, while down-playing parents' deployment of their own 'privileged' knowledge of the student. However, we argue that teachers do not unequivocally have the upper hand: that issues of power, identity, competence and moral conduct are at stake for all involved. The complex negotiations and skirmishes that take place during these encounters testify to their precarious location on the boundary between the two institutions of home and school. In requiring homes to render themselves visible, schools also, fleetingly, expose themselves to the risk of critical scrutiny from those on the outside.