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Article published In:
Dialogue in institutional settings
Edited by Franca Orletti and Letizia Caronia
[Language and Dialogue 9:1] 2019
► pp. 125–148

Assessing a (gifted) child in parent-teacher conference

Participants’ resources to pursue (and resist) a no-problem trajectory

| University of Bologna (Italy)
| University of Bologna (Italy)

Delivering and acknowledging assessments are the most recurrent institutional activities occurring in parent-teacher conference. This paper reports data from a mother-teacher conference concerning a gifted child. We show how participants’ practices to accomplish and receive assessment in the report-assessment phase of the event: (a) display their relative epistemic and deontic rights, (b) are oriented to participants’ institutional relevant identities, and (c) project or even enact different and quite opposite assessment trajectories. We contend that struggles in assessing the child display participants’ different stances: teachers’ ‘normalizing’ and ‘group oriented’ trajectory vs. the mother’s orientation toward ‘doctorability’ and pressure for individualized treatment. Although typically occurring between routine-case oriented institutions vs. idiosyncratic-case oriented clients, such a struggle displays also the ‘paradoxical injunctions’ that frame teachers’ everyday work: adopting a ‘group-oriented’ perspective while at the same time being accountable for an individualized approach.

Keywords: assessment trajectories, conversation analysis, deontic rights, epistemics, institutional cautiousness, knowledge management, mitigation, parent-teacher conference
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The structural organization and knowledge distribution in parent-teacher conference
  • 3.Data collection and analysis
  • 4.Constructing the assessable child
    • 4.1Displaying epistemic cautiousness: Evidentials and other mitigating devices in teachers’ assessment
    • 4.2Reducing the relevance of negative results
    • 4.3Negative assessments in service of positive evaluation: Co-implicating the parent in the making of diagnostic news
    • 4.4Downgrading the idiosyncratic nature of problematic behaviors: Generalizing as a normalization practice
  • 5.The mother’s receptions of the teacher’s assessments
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00035.car
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