Following the general interest of this symposium concerning the doings of sayings within classrooms our project “The Language of Recognition” focuses on practices of addressing. Relying on a wider definition of recognition (Balzer & Ricken, 2010; Ricken, 2006), including not only the meaning of complimenting someone for something but also conceptualise recognition as a constitutive act of calling someone into a certain existence (Benjamin, 1990; Butler, 2001, 2007), we tend to investigate the linguistic dimensions of such processes of recognition in classrooms. In order to examine such processes empirically we observe and analyse the ways in which teachers and students address each other during the lessons - relying on the thesis that reconstructing practices of addressing provides a fruitful empirical access to processes of recognition in school (Reh & Ricken, 2012, p. 42). Adapting approaches of practice theory for educational studies we conceive practices (of addressing) as an understandable “nexus of [certain] doings and sayings” (Schatzki, 2002, p. 73) that can be reconstructed. Empirically the project deploys methods of ethnographically and videographically observations (Breidenstein, 2010) to generate data in three classes (5th, 9th,11th grade) of an ordinary German high school. In order to analyse how teachers and students relate to one another in their addressing practices, how they mutually assign subject positions within them and how they establish (possibly specific pedagogical) regimes or orders of recognizability we combine aspects of conversation and discourse analysis (Ricken & Rose, in press). The theoretical aim of the project is to disclose the significance of recognition in and for pedagogical practices and to reconstruct empirically and in a differentiated manner the significance of language as the medium of recognition.

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