This paper focuses on the management of accountability, i.e., the ways in which interactants explain, justify or motivate their actions, making them rational and intelligible to others through language (Garfinkel, 1967), in parent-teacher conferences (PTCs).

In the last five decades or so, we witnessed a radical change in the cultural model governing the so-called care or helping professions that include “medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, counseling, social work, educationor coaching” (Graf et al., 2014, p. 1). In the name of the “client-centred approach” (Bensing et al., 2000; Mead & Bower, 2000; Petriwskyj et al., 2015) as well as the pedagogical “empowerment and participation” turns (Moran & Canavan, 2019), professionals have begun to be held accountable of their practices and can no longer base their claims solely on the professional authority that would ‘naturally’ belong to them (Peräkylä, 1998). The professionals’ balancing between authority and accountability has been considered as a sign of a change in the relationship between care professionals, and their clients: since the 1990s, not only has been observed that professionals have shown an orientation towards accountability (Heritage, 2005; Peräkylä, 1998), but this orientation is also encouraged by research and guidelines that promote participation and empowerment and stress the importance of a client-/patient-centred approach.

Previous research shows how and to what extent the pressure for accountability also affects teachers’ daily work (Baker & Keogh, 1995). As Weininger and Lareau (2003) contend, the framework of ‘partnership’ “provides a basis not only for an exchange of information between parents and teachers; it also leaves a great deal of room for maneuver” (p. 392). It is precisely within this space that parents deploy resources to hold the teachers accountable. For instance, they can problematize the teachers’ work, thus soliciting accounts from the teachers who, typically, reply by justifying or even defending their work. Recent research on solicited accounts shows that they are possible sites of erosion of the teachers’ epistemic authority (Caronia, 2023; Caronia & Vandini, 2019).

Nevertheless, teachers also produce unsolicited accounts,  i.e. description, explanation or rationalization of their ordinary practices and activities (Buttny, 1993) in situations that are not treated by participants as problematic and without being asked to do so by parents. This paper analyses the unsolicited accounts produced by teachers in parent-teacher conferences and explores their function, particularly their implications for the ongoing negotiation of epistemic rights in the interaction (Heritage, 2012).

Indeed, the negotiation of epistemic rights – “who knows (better) what” (Heritage, 2012) – is a key issue during PTCs, as both parents and teachers have first-hand knowledge of the child behaviour, at home and at school respectively, and can therefore have different perspectives. The epistemic landscape of PTCs (Caronia, 2023; Caronia & Dalledonne Vandini, 2019) is further complex as teachers are institutionally granted with expert knowledge, the one at play when it comes to pedagogically assessing the child’s behaviour. This entanglement of epistemic positions may result in both sides claiming epistemic primacy and therefore authority to know, understand and evaluate. This complexity in the negotiation of roles, epistemic rights and authority also finds confirmation in the teachers’ perceptions; as previous research on PTCs reports, teachers experience feelings of difficulty, confrontation, authority erosion in their relationship with parents (Addimando, 2013; Walker, 1998; Willemse et al., 2018).

This paper investigates teachers’ unsolicited account of their work as a practice through which they observably deal with their epistemic rights and authority in their interactions with parents. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the position of the accounts and their implications for the negotiation of epistemic rights and authority in the interaction.

This paper draws on a video-research (Heath et al., 2010) design which gives importance and value to the practices enacted in vivo by participants in communicative events. The use of video recording for data collection allows for a fine-grained analysis of the details through which social interaction is undertaken and participants build a shared world of meaning one interaction at a time (Goodwin, 2000; Sacks, 1994). In contrast to self-report studies, which rely on actors’ accounts and post hoc discursive reconstruction and sense-making of their practices, video research provides a system for noticing and understanding the (micro)resources and strategies that participants use in interaction to perform social actions, practices and activities (Duranti, 1997). The study draws on a corpus of 95 video-recorded parent-teacher conferences, collected in 4 different Italian primary schools. Overall, the data collection involved 10 teachers and the parents (mothers, fathers, or both) of 62 children. The participants’ consent was obtained in accordance with European data protection legislation (EU Regulation 679/2016). The analysis is conducted with the Conversation Analytic (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013) approach and extends to the multimodal aspects of the interaction (Mondada, 2014). This approach has proven to be particularly suitable for studying the management of accountability, knowledge, the negotiation of roles, authority, and responsibility, and the interactive realisation of communicative actions, such as giving accounts (Heritage, 2012; Robinson, 2016). In order to analyse the teachers’ orientation towards accountability and its implications for the negotiation of epistemic rights in parent-teacher conferences, a theory-based definition of account has been used to build up a collection of occurrences in which the teachers account for their work or conduct. In our corpus of 95 video-recorded parent-teacher conferences, we have found 68 occurrences of the teachers’ accounts, which take place during different activities in the conference and have different extensions, purposes and implications. Among these occurrences and considering the sequential positioning of the accounts, we distinguished between unsolicited accounts, i.e. produced spontaneously by teachers, or solicited accounts, i.e. produced in response to an action of their interlocutor, the parent. In this paper we focus on the 42 occurrences of unsolicited accounts.

Teachers’ unsolicited accounts of their own work practices may be considered as an index of the “client-centred” professional culture which gradually gained ground since the 1970ies, as well as of the teachers’ being oriented to “accountability” as a feature of their working practices. By focusing on the position of the accounts, the analysis shows that, through unsolicited accounts, teachers construct their evaluations and didactic practices as reasoned and themselves as sensible to the parents’ right to know and understanding the rationale governing the teachers’ activities, assessments and decisions. The detailed analysis of teachers’ unsolicited accounts undermine the alleged dichotomy between professional authority and accountability (Heritage, 2005; Peräkylä, 1998): it suggests that presenting professional practices (e.g., assessments, didactic choices) as rational and reasoned may help in maintaining credibility and reliability, and in fact strengthen the epistemic authority implied in pedagogical expertise.

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