Managing knowledge in parent-teacher conferences: participants’ resources to pursue different assessment trajectories

Abstract

As institutional interactions, parent-teacher conferences are the “typical” milieu where teachers try to enact their professional oriented identity. This paper reports data from a mother-teachers conference where two teachers talk with a mother about the school achievements of her gifted child. Data were analyzed following the multimodal Conversation Analysis techniques. The authors advance that, as the interacting parts talk about the child, these social actors follow two different assessment trajectories. While teachers pursue a no-problem trajectory, constructing the “child-at-school” as a relatively non-problematic pupil, the mother pursues a problem tra-jectory by framing the troublesome “child-at-home”. Analyses illustrate how the mother’s communicative strategies allow her to act as a “final arbiter” of the conference, demanding and getting a customized education for her child