The ethnomethodological tradition of classroom research is, roughly speaking, interested in the pragmatics, the members “methods”, and daily routines in establishing something like a “lesson” (cf. Mehan 1979, Doyle 2006, Breidenstein/Tyagunova 2012). It is directed to the constitutive analysis of how objects, identities, resources and „sense“ are used and (at the same time) produced within social practices. In the perspective of the „studies of work“ (Garfinkel 1986) everyday practices and the involved implicit knowledge are the main topic of research but not to judge or to decide on better or worse but to explore how the members of the social setting (the workplace) solve their (situated) problems. The concept of “ethnomethodological indifference” means “refraining from using exogenous theoretical categories when doing analysis and when making judgments” (Lindwall & Lymer 2005). So the researcher does not know it better than the participants and he or she does deliberately not ask for the quality of teaching and learning from outside the observed practice. But this does not mean that normativity would not be a topic of research: Normativity is a constitutive part of classroom practices – in as much as they are oriented towards the goal of learning and are framed by pedagogics. So it is crucial to take normativity into account when research tries to understand what is going on in classrooms. It has to ask how normativity comes into play within the practices, how (normative) goals are addressed and how the participants make clear (to themselves and others) that they are oriented towards those goals. The contribution will try to give some hints to this. Much of the ethnomethodological research on educational settings is concerned with establishing order in classrooms (cf. Macbeth 1990, Hester & Francis 2000, Doyle 2006) and with the structure of classroom discourse (Mehan 1979, Macbeth 1992). Studies on students´ activities within classroom settings show how these participants are taking part in establishing and holding up a (interaction) order in classrooms as well (cf. Breidenstein 2006, Hecht 2009, Tyagunova 2017). This kind of research which is directed to the problem of social order (in a specific situation) seems to have a strong bias towards functionality, regularity and pragmatics. It does seldom ask for disorder, crisis or change – so, there seems to be an implicit, not very much discussed (but normative!) bias towards orderliness and stability within the ethnomethodological tradition which will be addressed in the contribution as well.

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