Session Information
Contribution
The reputation someone (or a group) has is important information for those who interact with that person (or group) (Goffman 1981). Depending on the distribution of the power to define, such knowledge affects the evaluation of the behaviour of someone. This interactionist-theorem applies well in schools. In my paper I want to show a) how the reputation of families as reported in teachers narratives and stories enters into labelling processes affecting pupils; and b) what further functions the use of such narratives in the educational setting can have.
Since in Switzerland teachers do not know systematically the socio-economic background of the families of the children they have in the classroom, they must construct this knowledge by themselves. So the basic research question arises: How do teachers know the families’ reputation? One straightforward answer is: by telling each other (and the ethnographer) stories about the families and relating these stories to the observed behaviour or performance of the children. The data for this research stems out of the project “Integration by provisional exclusion? An ethnographic exploration of the “Time-out School” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2007. “The Forms of Capital.” Pp. 83-95 in Sociology of Education. A Critical Reader, edited by Alan R. Sadovnik. New York, Oxford: Routledge. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nadai, Eva and Christoph Maeder. 2009. “Contours of the Field(s): Multi-sited Ethnography as a Theory-driven Research Strategy for Sociology.” Pp. 233-250 in Multi-Sited Ethnography. Theory, Practice and Locality in Contemporary Research, edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. “A Tutorial on Membership Categorization.” Journal of Pragmatics. 39 (462-482). Kohler Riessman, Catherine. 2007. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thousand Oaks, New Dehli, London, Singapore: Sage. Silverman, David. 1994. Interpreting Qualitative Data - Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction. London, Thousand Oaks, New Dehli: Sage.
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