Initial encounters in the classroom and the process of establishment

Abstract

The ethnographic paradigm of classroom interaction research is now a well-established element of the sociology of education in Britain. There are now several collections of papers which represent the development and current state of work in this area (Chanan and Delamont, 1975; Stubbs and Delamont, 1976; Woods and Hammersley, 1977) as well as Delamont’s (1976) exemplary introductory text. Most of the work, from the ethnographic paradigm, included in these various contributions to the field is founded to a greater or lesser extent upon a theoretical perspective derived from symbolic interactionism, although phenomenological and ethnomethodological perspective have also made themselves felt (e.g. Torode, 1976, 1977; Cicourel, et al., 1974; Payne, 1976). However, despite the growing body of empirical work on classroom interaction and the concomitantly increasing amount of theoretical commentary, surprisingly little attention has yet been given to the evolutionary and developmental nature of teacher-pupil relationships in the classroom setting. The tendency has been (with one or two exceptions in the American literature) to treat and portray classroom relationships as fixed and static patterns of interaction within which teachers select strategies or act out the constitutive rules or procedures which serve to structure this interaction. Little attention has been given to the ways in which strategies are tested or rules established and in my view this has tended to inhibit the development of a coherent formal theory of classroom interaction. In part, I want to argue, this state of affairs is an artifact of the nature of classroom interaction research itself and the constraints upon it. The problem is that most researchers, with limited time and money available to them, are forced to organise their classroom observation into short periods of time. This usually involves moving into already established classroom situations where teachers and pupils have considerably greater experience of their interactional encounters than does the observer. Even where the researcher is available to monitor the initial encounters between a teacher and pupils, the teacher is, not unreasonably, reluctant to be observed at this stage.