The study of social interaction in educational settings: Accomplishments and unresolved issues
Human Development; Basel; Jul/Aug 1998; Hugh Mehan

Volume: 41
Issue: 4
Start Page: 245-269
ISSN: 0018716X
Subject Terms: Schools
Behavior
Social psychology
Learning
Abstract:
The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings is placed in historical context. The major themes of interactional analysis--that social and cognitive structures are constructed in social interaction, human behavior is context-specific, cultural discontinuity helps explain educational inequality, and learning is a sociocultural process--are reviewed, and the contributions of these findings to theory, methodology and pedagogy are assessed.

Full Text:
Copyright S. Karger AG Jul/Aug 1998
[Headnote]
The Study of Social Interaction in Educational Settings: Accomplishments and Unresolved Issues
[Headnote]
Abstract
[Headnote]
The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings is placed in historical context. The major themes of interactional analysis - that social and cognitive structures are constructed in social interaction, human behavior is context-specific, cultural discontinuity helps explain educational inequality, and learning is a sociocultural process - are reviewed, and the contributions of these findings to theory, methodology and pedagogy are assessed. The paper concludes with a discussion of two unresolved issues: the integration of social structure and interaction in interactional analysis and the reconciliation of conflictual and consensual dimensions of learning.
[Headnote]
Key Words Constructivism Context-specific behavior Critical ethnography Cultural discontinuity Interaction Macro-micro connections Microethnography Sociocultural theory

Introduction

I review the accomplishments and unresolved issues in the study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings - primarily those that occur in school. The intellectual roots of this line of investigation are discussed in the Introduction. The major themes of interactional analysis are identified in Themes and Achievements. The contributions of an interactional view of social and cognitive structures, a context-specific view of human behavior, a cultural discontinuity explanation of educational inequality, and a sociocultural conception of learning to theory, methodology, and pedagogy are presented in Assessment of Contributions. I conclude the paper by suggesting that future work must continue to find ways to incorporate social structure and culture in interactional analysis and reconcile the conflictual and consensual dimensions of learning.

Historical Context

The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings dates to the 1960s, during which time there was a growing concerns that students from low-income families and ethnic-minority backgrounds were not doing well in school. Controversial explanations of this achievement gap appearing at the time energized this emerging perspective.

Jensen [1969] shocked academics and lay people alike when he concluded that biology limited the development of African Americans' human potential and large-scale interventions would not close the achievement gap between Blacks and Whites: `Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed' [p. 2]. Bereiter and Englemann [1966, p. 32] staked out an equally contentious position when they declared that '... the speech of lower-class people ... is inadequate for expressing personal or original opinions, for analysis and careful reasoning, for dealing with anything hypothetical or beyond the present, and for explaining anything very complex'. This `linguistic deprivation' led to the poor academic performance of low-income students.

Authors of the pioneering interactional studies of educational settings responded vehemently to these claims. The idea of blaming educational difficulties on a hereditary deprivation [Herrnstein, 1974; Jensen, 1969] or a cultural deprivation [Bereiter and Englemann, 1966; Deutsch, 1967] was challenged as erroneous because these explanations denigrated the rich and complex social organization of low-income students, their families and communities. Furthermore, hereditary and cultural deprivation arguments were attacked because they overlooked how society's economic arrangements (money, status, and power), the institutional practices of the school (ability grouping, testing and tracking), and awkward relations between home, school, and work contributed to the construction of students' educational success or failure.

From the mid-1960s to the present, the practitioners of interactional analysis have sought to correct the portrayal of historically subjugated groups, to construct learning environments that help improve their educational situation, to inform us how citizens and researchers alike are a part of the problem, and to account for the political economics of the ideology that delivers the problem in the first place. The appearance of books such as The Bell Curve [Herrnstein and Murray, 1994] show that this corrective work must continue because hereditary and cultural deprivation arguments have not been defeated completely.

Intellectual Origins

The study of social interaction in educational settings had its intellectual roots in anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. Whereas developmental psychologists have had a long-standing interest in learning outside of school, psychologists influenced by the Soviet sociohistorical school energized the study of educational interaction in significant ways - most notably by focusing attention on the social basis of students' learning.

The pioneers in interactional analysis drew upon an eclectic assortment of precursors - sociolinguistics, kinesics, conversation analysis, cognitive anthropology, the anthropology of education, ethnomethodology - and blended them into new and unique research questions. In sociolinguistics, Ervin-Tripp [1973], Grimshaw [1981], Gumperz [1971], Hymes [1974], Labov [1970, 1972], and Shuy [1972] [see also Cazden et al., 1972; Gumperz and Hymes, 1964, 1972] were displaying the social basis of language use. In kinesics, Birdwhistell [1970] and Scheflen [1972] were showing that nuances of body movement and positioning are not random, but systematic and sequenced and can reinforce, complement, or contradict verbal messages. In conversation analysis Sacks et al. [ 1974] were plotting the sequential organizational features of ordinary conversations. In cognitive anthropology Conklin [1955, 1962], D'Andrade [1976], Frake [1961, 1964], and Goodenough [1956, 1964] recast culture in cognitive terms by asking: What knowledge do members of a society need to employ to be recognized as competent? In the anthropology of education, Jules Henry [1963] and Spindler and Spindler [1971] showed us the utility of investigating educational settings for the operation of cultural processes such as socialization and the transmission of knowledge. In ethnomethodology, Cicourel [1964,1968,1970] and Garfinkel [ 1967] encouraged investigators to reveal the `social work' that constructed the enduring and constraining social facts of the social world.

The early practitioners of the art, although from many different disciplines, uniformly expressed a dissatisfaction with the prevailing methodological tools and theoretical paradigms within their fields and looked at moment-to-moment interaction in order to better understand the constitutive processes that produce students' school success or difficulty.

Themes and Achievements

In this review of the achievements of interactional analysis in education, I identify 4 themes: (1) the social construction of social and cognitive structures: (2) the contextspecific nature of human behavior; (3) the development of `cultural discontinuity' theory to explain the differential educational opportunities facing low-income, language and ethnic-minority students, and (4) the social nature of learning.

Social and Cognitive Structures Are Constructed in Interaction

From 1965 forward, researchers studied teacher-student interaction in classrooms, testing sessions, counseling sessions, homes, and after-school activities. `Microethnographers', as Erickson [1975] called them, used videotape, audiotape and/or transcripts derived from them as materials for analysis. These materials were consulted, first of all, because face-to-face interaction is a site where unequal opportunities are generated and can, hopefully, be repaired. Audiotape and videotape materials from these settings were used, second, because microethnographers were committed to showing how phenomena come to be in situ, `across persons, just now', and for what purposes or goals.

This methodological commitment, in turn, generated a different genre of research questions. Instead of asking questions that seem to imply a correlational answer, such as: `What background characteristics of children are correlated with academic achievement?' Or, `What features of school are correlated with an educational outcome?' microethnographic studies asked questions that call for a constitutive answer. `What is the interactional work of ... [disability, identity, school success]?' Or: `When is a context?' Or: `How is inequality constructed?' `How can inequality be de-constructed?' `How can equity be constructed?'

McDermott's [1976] stunning portrayal of the interactional dances in a bottom reading group vividly illustrates the doing of inequality. The teacher and students colluded to get turns to read, avoid reading, avoid painful interactions, assist those who need help the least, and thereby provided different educational opportunities to the students in the bottom reading group than were provided to students in the top reading group.

Investigators of educational testing [Cicourel et al., 1974; Mehan, 1973, 1978; and later Marlaire and Maynard, 1990, and Poole, 1994] found testers and students jointly assembling answers to IQ test questions. Testers' hints and cues - even their pauses contributed differential information to students' answering, which in turn led testers to treat students' answers differently. These findings led investigators to conclude that intelligence, that 'natural' talent which we attribute to individuals, emerges from the interaction between testers, students and the mediating technology of the test. Paraphrasing Marx and dragging him into the messiness of everyday life: Test scores (which are a summary of sequences of negotiations between testers and students) are alienating. When presented as numerals, they are individualized products divorced from the social means of their production.

Erickson's [1975] and Erickson and Shultz's [1982] precise analysis of the `interactional synchrony' between college counselors and students during interviews displayed, frame by frame, how steps on an educational career ladder are formed in interaction. For instance, counselors often inquired into students' high school experience, athletics or club memberships. Students who formed `co-membership' with their counselors based on this 'particularistic' information received different advice than those students who did not form these special relationships, which in turn, led to different access to educational possibilities.

Gumperz and Herasimchuk [1975] revealed how the self-fulfilling prophecy about students' performance is worked out day-to-day in elementary school classrooms. Students in a top group read stories and poems during their reading time, while students in a bottom group were drilled on parts of speech during their reading time. At the end of the school year, bottom group students performed poorly on tests, while top group students did well, thereby confirming the teacher's initial predictions about her students' skills.

Michaels [1981] showed how a teacher's implicit assumptions about the way in which stories are to be told reinforced the production of narratives by White children, but stifled the production of narratives by Black children during that ubiquitous classroom event called `sharing time'. This differential treatment gave Black and White children differential access to literacy.

These 'microethnographies' demonstrate that face-to-face interaction is a productive site for the study of cultural production and reproduction. Significant cognitive structures, such as 'intelligence', 'ability' and 'disability', such social structures as identities and steps on educational career ladders are socially constructed in locally organized social situations.

Human Behavior Is Context-Bound

In a second line of investigation, interactional studies attacked the idea that cultural arrangements in minority communities are inherently inferior. In the hallmark study in this tradition, Labov [ 1970,1972] debunked Bereiter and Englemann's [ 1966] cultural deprivation explanation of the poor academic performance of Black students by demonstrating that BEV is a systematic, coherent and logical linguistic system, albeit conforming to different rules than 'standard' English. (The controversy generated by the Oakland School District when it proposed to develop educational programs in 1996 using 'Ebonics' (BEV) shows, however, that knowledge about Labov's conclusion has been lost by the educational community. How and why well established social science evidence is not retained in public political discourse is a topic that requires extensive investigation.)

Soon, a plethora of studies were conducted that showed children who were made to look stupid in experiments and on tests and in counselors' offices could be clever, verbally expressive, and logical on the playground, in the grocery store, or at the dinner table [Bremme, 1982; Diaz et al., 1986; Erickson and Shultz, 1977; Hall et al., 1977; Heath, 1982, 1983, 1986; Moll and Diaz, 1987; Philips, 1972, 1982; Shultz et al., 1979].

By revealing `context-bound behavior', these studies made the case that the lives of children are well organized, complex and wise, if only we knew where and how to look. Thus, these studies exposed the limitations of the current theoretical vision and research methods when examining children's competencies, especially those from language and ethnic minority backgrounds. Subjugated children are competent; we often do not know how to see their strengths.

Cultural Discontinuity Explanations of Educational Inequality

In a third line of inquiry, researchers studied the social organization of classroom lessons and compared the language used in the classroom to the language spoken in low income and ethnic minority homes. These cross-context, cross-cultural comparisons led to the `cultural discontinuity' account of school difficulty to rival the cultural deprivation thesis.

Close analysis of classroom interaction uncovered unspoken classroom rules and previously unnoticed norms for classroom behavior. These include `Initiation-ReplyEvaluation' (I-R-E) sequences with their `known information questions' that can deaden discussion and induce passivity in students [Cazden, 1988; Edwards and Mercer, 1987; Mehan, 1979; Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975]; tacit turn-allocation rules that invited competition among students and focused teachers' surveillance upon individual students [Humphries, 1979; McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1978, 1979], and the indirect verbal messages, systematic shifts in participants' postures, conversational rhythms and prosody [Bremme, 1982; Erickson and Shultz, 1977; Green and Wallat, 1981; McDermott and Gospodinoff, 1981; McDermott et al., 1978] that signal the creation of and shifts between classroom contexts.

The culture of the classroom, then, is similar to other culturally based activities, in that it is guided by rules or norms established by convention, which means these rules are implicitly taught, tacitly agreed upon, and cooperatively maintained. Therefore, all students, but especially those from low-income, ethnic- and linguistic-minority families, are forced, under normal circumstances, to learn the tacit rules of the classroom culture as they had learned their first language - implicitly. Because mastery of the language of the classroom and more specialized academic discourses is so vitally important, some researchers have recommended that students be taught academic discourse, the `codes of power', explicitly [Delpit, 1988]. Modeling, participating in meaningful communicative endeavors within discourse communities, and `talking science' with experts [Gee, 1990; Gee et al., 1992; Lemke, 1990; Roseberry et al., 1992] have proven helpful in enabling students to demystify the hidden curriculum of the school.

Comparisons of the features of the language spoken in the homes of low-income ethnic-minority and language-minority students with the discourse features demanded in the classroom have revealed significant differences [Au, 1980; Au and Jordan, 1980; Cazden,1988; Delgado-Gaiton,1988; Gumperz,1983; Heath,1982,1983,1986; Levin, 1978; Shultz et al.,1979; Trueba, 1988; Wells, 1986]. In the best known example of this research tradition, Heath [1983] compared the way middle-income teachers (both Black and White) talked to their Black low-income elementary school students in the classroom with the way in which these teachers talked to their own children at home in a community she calls 'Trackton'. Like Cazden [1979], she found that teachers rely heavily on questions and language games like peekaboo and riddles when they talk to their children at home [Cazden, 1979; Heath, 1983]. The most frequent form of question is the `known information' variety so often identified with classroom discourse [Shuy and Griffin,1978; Sinclair and Coulthard,1975; Mehan,1979]. Middle-income parents also talk to preverbal children often, supplying the surrounding context and hypothetical answers to questions they pose. These `quasi conversations' anticipated the I-R-E sequence of traditional classroom lessons.

Heath reported that the children of the middle-income teachers were being taught to label and name objects and to talk about them out of context, which were just the skills demanded of students in school. These same teachers talked to the students in their classrooms in ways that were very similar to the ways in which they talked to their own children at home. They instructed students primarily through an interrogative format using `known information questions', taught students to label objects, and identify the features of things.

This mode of language use and language socialization was not prevalent in the homes of low-income students. Low-income adults only seldom addressed questions to their children at home, and even less often to preverbal children. Where Trackton teachers would use questions, Trackton parents would use statements or imperatives. And when questions were asked, of children by their parents, they were much different than the types of questions asked by teachers. Questions at home called for nonspecific comparisons or analogies as answers. They were not the known information questions associated with the classroom. Heath concludes that the language used in Trackton homes did not prepare children to cope with the major characteristics of the language used in classrooms: Utterances that were interrogative in form but directive in pragmatic function, known information questions, and questions that asked for information from books.

Based on her careful comparison of Native American students' performance in classrooms and at home, Philips [1972, 1982] countered the cultural deficiency interpretation of the school difficulty of Native American students. Philips attributed the generally poor performance of Native American children to differences in the `structures of participation' normatively demanded in the home and in the school, not to deficiencies in Indian culture. She found that Native American children performed poorly in those classroom contexts that demanded individualized performance and emphasized competition among peers, but they performed more effectively in those classroom contexts that minimized the obligation of individual students to perform in public contexts. The classroom contexts in which Native American students operated best were similar in organization to local Native American community contexts, where cooperation and not competition was valued, and sociality and not individuality was emphasized. It seems that the patterns of participation normally expected in conventional classrooms create conditions that are unfamiliar and threatening to Native American children.

The way in which Polynesian children are taught to elicit and impart information by their parents at home differs from the ways deployed in the classroom [Au, 1980; Au and Jordan, 1980; Levin, 1978]. Polynesian parents rarely provide elaborate verbal explanations or justifications for their actions, but they do use their children as sources of genuine information and news. Thus, in the home context, the children learn to respond to `information seeking questions'. The schools that Polynesian students attend employ test questions in the conventional I-R-E format and claims to truth are settled by the teacher's authority, whereas in Polynesian communities claims to truth are settled by consensus. Polynesian students, as a consequence, find mismatches between the tacit rules and procedures of the classroom and those that they learned at home.

These cross-context, cross-cultural comparisons formed the basis for the `cultural discontinuity' explanation of school performance. This hypothesis suggests that the differences between the demands of classrooms and other settings cause difficulties, especially for students from certain low-income and linguistic-minority backgrounds. Because the speech used by middle-income parents does match the often implicit and tacit demands of the classroom, their children are being equipped with the very skills and techniques that are rewarded in the classroom. Because the speech used by lowincome, language-minority parents does not match the discourse of the classroom, their children are not being provided with the implicit cultural resources that are demanded in the classroom.

The strengths of the cultural discontinuity theory are many. By moving beyond the states and traits of individuals to social situations as the unit of analysis, it does not blame low achieving students' school difficulties on their lack of motivation, diminished linguistic skills, or deficient cognitive styles. By calling attention to the importance of educational decision-making encounters (teachers, testers, and counselors in institutionally important positions, judging the behavior of children), the concept of 'context' was made an important analytical tool. Instead of culture flowing directly into the heads of children, culture was shown to be mediated within power-laden socially organized settings.

Although the discontinuity hypothesis has been lauded for its counterattack on the cultural deficiency account, it is not without its detractors. Ogbu [1981, 1987] praised the discontinuity hypothesis faintly because it accounts for the educational difficulties of certain language and ethnic minority groups (Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans), but criticized it roundly because it is not able to account for the educational success of other minority groups (notably: Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Jewish immigrants to the United States).

By calling attention to the linguistic and social features of the ethnic-minority or language-minority home that do not match the tacit expectations of the middle-income school (e.g., few known information questions, no bedtime story, few out-of-context questions), the discontinuity perspective can be guilty of reducing inequality to a problem of miscommunication. Even if parents read more stories to their children at bedtime, or teachers learned to respect language-minority students' codes or learned to communicate effectively with them, structural inequities (glass ceilings, down-sized corporations, and institutional discrimination in the workplace, for example) would remain.

By focusing attention on mismatches between the low-income home and the middle-income school, the discontinuity perspective runs the risk of unwittingly falling back into the deprivationist trap. Homes or schools without these features can be characterized, once again, as deficient [McDermott and Varenne, 1995]. By assuming that the success or failure of individual students from ethnic groups needs to be explained, the discontinuity perspective overlooks the 'work' that all members of society do to make school failure a category that is ever ready to be applied to children that in most other circumstances would be characterized as normal human development [McDermott, 1997].

The discontinuity perspective also rests on a romantic vision of social change. Cultural discontinuity theorists believed it was their job to explain inequality in ways that were respectful. If authorities understood the miscommunication between teachers and language-minority students, then they would fix the problem. Authorities would change the situation because they had been ignorant of the students' strengths. This approach reveals a naivete about the influence of knowledge in social change. It underestimates the political and cultural forces constraining teacher-student relations and the organization of the school [McDermott, 1997].

Learning Is Constructed through Guided Assistance

Interactional research influenced by anthropology, linguistics, and sociology examined such topics as the social organization of educational events (most notably, classroom lessons), the formation of students' identities, the social construction of ability (intelligence), and the exercise of power in producing differential educational treatment. Developmental and cognitive psychologists have had a long-standing interest in learning, especially in apprenticeship and other nonschool settings [Bruner et al., 1966; Childs and Greenfield,1980; Cole et al.,1971; Cole and Scribner,1974; Greenfield and Lave, 1982; Lave,1977]. Under the emerging influence of the Soviet sociohistorical (or sociocultural) school of thought within psychology [Bakhtin, 1981; Leont'ev, 1978; Luria, 1976; Vygotsky, 1978], students' classroom learning became a new and soon central topic of interactional analysis in school-based educational settings.

Researchers influenced by the sociohistorical tradition have demonstrated the usefulness of the `zone of proximal development' notion especially when studying learning and classroom instruction. In particular, sociocultural research has shown the conditions under which children can benefit from interaction with more experienced members of their culture [Brown and Campione, 1994; Griffin and Cole, 1984; Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger,1991; Newman et al.,1989; Rogoff,1990; Rogoff et al.,1993; Rogoff and Wertsch, 1984]. Rogoff [1990], for instance, presents evidence to show how children develop their thinking as they participate in cultural activities such as weaving, cooking, and conversing with the guidance of caregivers and experts.

Tudge [1990] discusses peer collaboration in the zone of proximal development, where more competent peers interact with less competent peers in conservation tasks. Nonconservers come to an initial understanding of conservation when collaborating with a more competent peer and then show evidence of conservation in later, independent performance.

Clay and Cazden [ 1990] recast the Australian-based Reading Recovery program in Vygotskian terms and illustrate its workings. At the outset of instruction, the Reading Recovery teacher does not try to teach the child anything new, but initiates actions that allow the child to use and experience further the knowledge and behaviors she/he already controls. Building new information off the foundation of the child's past experience, the teacher introduces new material that prompts the child to construct new meanings. During this phase of literacy development, the teacher accepts partially correct replies and then builds a scaffold from them to correct replies.

Tharp and Gallimore [1988, pp. 67-69] analyze students' developing understanding of concepts in terms of performance assisted by the teacher. In `instructional conversations', teachers assist the children by providing the structure of the question that provokes the assimilation of students' prior understanding with new knowledge.

Newman et al. [1989] studied how the `same task' is produced in different situations. To this end, they compared the presentation of problem isomorphs in a laboratory-based tutoring situation and a classroom work group, compared the teaching of the `same task' to students of `different ability', and examined how students of `different ability' learned the `same task' in a whole group lesson. This set of investigations showed how teachers and students acting together produced differences in the content and form of instruction, even though no one was trying to produce differential opportunities for success. In addition, Newman et al. reformulate the bedrock idea in sociocultural theory, the `zone of proximal development', from a distance drawn in one dimension between novice and expert to a space or a field which teachers and students, novices and experts enter with different perspectives and negotiate outcomes.

Dissatisfied with the limitations of the recitation script, with its low-level questions and confining I-R-E sequences, educators explored more complex instruction [Brown and Campione, 1994; Cohen, 1994; Palinscar et al., 1993]. Educators' interest in problem solving, inquiry and higher order thinking have led to intriguing new research approaches, notably teacher-researcher collaborations. Aided by a discourse analysis [Gee et al.,1992; Gumperz,1983] that invokes classroom talk as evidence for social and cognitive processes, Lemke [1990] and Roseberry et al. [1992] showed us how organizing classroom discourse around a `sense making' approach to science develops languageminority students' understanding of scientific concepts without trampling on their everyday knowledge and experience. Organizing classroom lessons to promote complex instruction (heterogeneous and cooperative groups of students working on thematically connected open-ended problems) [Brown and Campione, 1994; Cohen, 1994] enables traditionally disempowered students to learn science by learning to `talk science' [Lemke,1990; Reddy,1995].

Assessment of Contributions

From our vantage point in 1998, what can we say about the contributions of interactional analyses of educational settings since 1966? I arrange my answers to this question under the headings of theory, methodology and pedagogy.

Theoretical Contributions: A New Paradigm for Understanding Inequality

From the time of their earliest investigations, students of interaction in educational settings made two significant theoretical moves. On the one hand, they removed social structures from a disembodied external world and relocated them in social interaction. On the other hand, they took cognitive structures out of the mind and relocated them in the interaction. The `social facts' that sociologists traditionally have treated as objective and autonomous (such as identities and educational careers), and cognitive processes that psychologists have treated as subjective and individual (such as intelligence, learning and thinking) were recast as collaboratively constructed and continuously embedded in face-to-face interaction in social environments. The interactional line of research recommends person-context relations as a basic unit of analysis as an alternative to isolated individuals. In this formulation, both structure and cognition are understood in relation to the social environments in which they occur.

Interactional studies did not just approach the old cognitive and social facts and show them to have a different origin. They delivered different social and cognitive facts. Analyzed interactionally, 'ability', 'intelligence', `learning disability' and 'incompetence' are no longer what they are. These are not the states or traits of an individual person. They are a dynamic, mutually constitutive and reflexive relation between individual and environments populated by other people, and may change from moment to moment, situation to situation.

This mutually constitutive view of social life helped reseachers understand more deeply the causes of educational inequality. They argue persuasively against essentialist and reductionist interpretations that attribute the cause of school difficulty to the characteristics of failing students, whether the characteristics are genetic, associated with home or cultural environments or associated with their parents' social class. They counter reified structural theories that attribute the cause of school failure to general economic or structural forces with more interactionally based approaches that see school success and failure, as social constructions within the social organization of the school and the relation of school to society.

When microethnographers report that `interactional synchrony' occurs most often between counselors and students who had established a high degree of particularistic co-membership, or report that intelligence emerges in the vagaries of tester-student interaction or show how social situations conspire to reveal students' disabilities, these researchers are uncovering aspects of the machinery that contributes to the assembly of students' identities and the steps on students' career ladders. Importantly, this is an interactional machinery. It is neither the one-directional transmission or conveyor belt posited by reproduction theorists [Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Bowles and Gintis, 1976] nor the free and open achievement system posited by mobility theorists [Chubb and Moe, 1990; Davis and Moore, 1945; Dreeben, 1968; Parsons, 1959; Turner, 1960].

Consequently, microethnographic work invites us to recast our thinking about schooling. When microethnographers point out that teachers treat students in high and low 'ability' groups differentially, or give different counseling information, or modify national policy at the local level, they are not blaming parents from low-income families for inadequate socialization or deprived cultural practices. Nor are they condemning teachers for tracking low-income students or willfully disobeying federal law. Rather, they are showing how teachers and students mutually adapt to the organizational and pedagogical dilemmas that educational policies and/or practices pose for them.

Once we recognize that the daily life of students, teachers and parents continuously involves local adaptations to organizational constraints, then we derive a more realistic conception of schooling. Schools are not innocent sites of cultural transmission, places where consensual values are inculcated, or meritocratic springboards for mobility. Nor are they automatic reproduction machines, exacerbating or perpetuating social inequalitites in mechanical ways.

Schools are caught in the middle of competing agendas. On the one hand, schools are asked to insure that all students achieve to the best of their ability. On the other hand, schools are asked to insure that all students gain access to the same educational opportunities. Schools have made accommodations and compromises when responding to the competing demands of these agendas, as microethnographic analysis of the practices of ability grouping and tracking illustrate. Mobility theorists see ability group and track placements as the natural consequence of the competition among individual talent, hard work, and effort. For them, the cream of the student crop naturally rises to the top. Reproduction theorists see these stratifying practices as the sinister embodiment of capitalism's demand for passive and compliant workers. Close and careful examination of the daily life of schools shows that the former is naive and the latter is overdrawn. A more realistic acocunt is that schools have established separate ability groups and tracks in order to meet the often competing demands of 'excellence' and 'equity' agendas: keeping high-end students in school while giving enhanced educational opportunities to low-achieving minority students.

Pedagogical Contributions: Culturally Compatible Instruction

There is considerable evidence that the `recitation script' - in which teacher talk dominated the lesson, the teacher asks many known information questions, the students' role is limited to answering the teacher's questions - is widespread, not only in North America [Wells, 1986], but in Britain [Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975], France [Anderson-Levitt, 1981], Australia [Malcolm, 1977], in French schools on Tibuai [Levin, 1978] and in Western-influenced schools in Papua New Guinea [Miller, 1981]. Researchers have found some different forms of lesson organization in certain cultural settings, however.

In a classroom of Odawa students taught by an Odawa teacher on a Canadian Indian reserve, Erickson and Mohatt [ 1982] found some lesson features to be similar to the seemingly ubiquitous recitation script. Many features of her lesson were significantly different, however. She organized students into small groups for instruction. She seldom addressed individual students by name; instead she addressed groups. She seldom broadcast messages across the room; instead she approached students when addressing them. The evaluation component of I-R-E sequences tended to be implicit; by going on to a next question, she signaled her acceptance of students' answers. Perhaps most significantly, there were few direct or overt exercises of social control; instead the teacher praised students in public, reprimanded them in private. Importantly, these participation structures were consistent with those employed in Odawa homes.

In a similar fashion, Lipka [1991] demonstrated how one Yup'ik Eskimo teacher reinforced Yup'ik values, emphasizing the themes of subsistence and survival in a lesson about hunting and mounting beaver pelts. This teacher enabled rights and responsibilities for participation different from mainstream classrooms by organizing his classroom along principles of individual autonomy, group harmony, and solidarity. Au and Jordan [1980] found divergent rather than convergent questioning, information-seeking rather than test questions, and a cascade of students' responses rather than a cycle of I-R-E sequences in a Polynesian teacher's interaction with Native Hawaiian students. In addition, students' knowledge and a local sociolinguistic pattern, the `talk story', were incorporated into the lesson structure.

Piestrup [1973] found that effective teachers in 14 predominantly Black first-grade classrooms in the Oakland public school system employed rhythmic language, rapid intonation, repetition, alliteration, call and response, variation in pace, and creative language play prevalent in the surrounding Black community. In a similar fashion, Foster [1989, 1995] found classroom interaction in a predominantly Black community college to be more symmetrical (the teacher and students had equivalent numbers of turns and cooperative learning groups were formed). This community college teacher also called for active vocal audience responses and descriptions of personal experiences, strategies which were similar to the speech performance patterns in the local Black community.

Important suggestions for educational practice have been derived from this `cultural discontinuity' tradition of cross-cultural research. This group vehemently opposes proposals to change the children who come to school from low-income families by eradicating their cultural habits or linguistic expressions. Quite the contrary, they encourage the maintenance of home cultural practices while students learn the practices of the school. To achieve this end, they propose models of mutual accommodation in which both teachers and students modify their behavior as they move together in the direction of common goals. Such modifications include rearranging classrooms into small, cooperative groups for instruction, changing teachers' questioning to induce choral responses, and appropriating students' knowledge for use in classroom instruction. There is, of course, a certain irony here. The cultural practice of historically subjugated groups, which have so often been reviled, are now being celebrated as exemplars of outstanding pedagogic practice.

Especially because the implementation of culturally compatible instructional practices have assisted the educational progress of language- and ethnic-'minority' students, the question arises: Are these practices only appropriate for 'minority' groups or are they appropriate across a wider range of students? [Hollins, 1996; Tharp et al., 1994]. This question is particularly relevant because of the source of information about culturally compatible instruction and the character of many of today's urban classrooms. Whereas these studies were conducted in monocultural or at most bicultural classrooms, many urban classrooms today are often multicultural in the true sense of that term. This question is also relevant given the often heated argument over the nature of the curriculum (which is often expressed in simplistic, dichotomous terms: Should there be a universal, standard canon or should the curriculum be opened up to include representatives from our diverse, multicultural society?).

I think there are general principles to be derived from cross-cultural studies of classroom practice. Under no circumstances should these general principles be confused [as does Osborne, 1996, p. 299] with specific recipes.

Variety. It makes sense for all students to express their knowledge in a wide variety of modalities, to experience a variety of grouping arrangements, to be challenged at the upper end of their zones of development with accompanying systems of social support, to be criticized in private, not embarrassed in public, and to have their cultural knowledge treated with respect and used as a resource in classroom instruction.

Note carefully: this is a general recommendation. It is not the same as telling teachers to use a particular pedagogic practice (for example, small groups, cooperative groups or voluntary turn-allocation strategies) exclusively and repeatedly. If cultural compatibility is interpreted narrowly - as asking teachers to match school to home - then members of language- and ethnic-minority groups may not be encouraged to expand their repertoire to include new possibilities [McCarty et al., 1991].

An example drawn from the education of Native American students illustrates this point. Ironically, in the name of cultural compatibility, educators have emphasized nonverbal means of instruction and cue-response scripted drills as a way to reach 'nonverbal' Indian students. McCarty et al. [ 1991 ] say that these erstwhile attempts have had an unfortunate side effect. Indian students are not taught with higher-order questioning and inquiry methods.

McCarty and her associates designed lessons in `Navajo Humanities' that encouraged students to draw upon their prior knowledge to solve new problems. The social studies materials presented familiar scenes and the teachers' inquiry and informationseeking questions tapped students' knowledge and experience. In this new classroom environment, Navajo children were verbal, assertive, made innovative generalizations, and responded, eagerly and enthusiastically, to inquiry-based questioning.

Flexibility. Flexibility is the key to my conclusion. As Vogt's [Vogt et al., 1987] experiences when she attempted to duplicate the key elements of the KEEP program from Hawaii in the Rough Rock Navajo reservation remind us, teachers are mistaken if they try to match a particular pedagogic practice with a particular cultural group. Doing so limits educational opportunities and reduces cultural groups to hollow, one-dimensional stereotypes.

The classroom management technique of quickly confronting trouble (`quick nice') that worked so well with native Hawaiians, antagonized young Navajo boys; Vogt learned to control misbehavior by ignoring or lowering her eyes and giving a short stern lecture to the whole group, not singling out the offending student. The boy-girl cooperative learning groups that worked so well with native Hawaiians did not work with native Americans. Vogt had to segregate the sexes in order to keep interaction moving.

Adaptation to Local Circumstances. Teachers always need to be sensitive to nuances in teacher-student relations and must be able to change their behavior yearto-year, day-to-day, even moment-to-moment. As Jacob and Jordan [ 1993] caution us:

Good educational practice does not exist outside of a particular educational context and that just good teaching' is not just good teaching at all, but a complex process of combining information from a number of different sources to produce practice well adapted to the population and setting at hand [p. 256].

That is, no matter how impressive, no matter how provocative, pedagogic practices must be artfully fitted to local circumstances [Cazden and Mehan, 1989; Goldenberg and Gallimore, 1989; Mehan et al., 1996].

Particularity. Finally, researcher/educators (myself included) are fond of saying to teachers: `Go explore the community, learn about your kids' culture.' That may be a difficult if not impossible task, especially given the rich diversity in today's urban classrooms, which have as many as 20 language groups present. If we are not careful, teachers will draw stereotypic conclusions in their exuberance to be ethnographers of their classrooms. Insteaad of trying to learn the generalities of ethnic groups in the abstract, the studies reviewed here recommend that teachers learn about the details of their students' lives in particular. This means teachers will have to explore their students' `funds of knowledge' [Moll et al., 1992] and experiences by observing their students in the classroom, on the playground, and in the community, talking with their students, their families and members of the community. The context-specific nature of cultural knowledge means that what the teacher learns about students one year may not apply to students the next year. Therefore, teachers will have to engage in this ethnographic process on a regular basis.

These studies signal a new relationship between teacher, researcher and pedagogical knowledge. Many of the insights into culturally compatible instruction emerged when teachers and researchers collaborated. In this new configuration, the teacher moves from being a passive recipient of packaged research knowledge to a collaborative constructor of pedagogical knowledge useful in local circumstances. Indeed, the `teacher as researcher' model has become the hallmark of many teacher education efforts [Hollins, 1996].

Methodological Contributions. Grounding Claims in the Interaction

Implicit in this assessment of theoretical developments and empirical findings is the methodological contribution made by students of educational interaction. Let me make some of those methodological contributions more explicit at this point.

Distressed over the disconnected and decontextualized quality of the conclusions drawn from tests, surveys and experiments, microethnographers developed a rigorous methodological commitment: Claims must be grounded in the interaction. Since social phenomena, such as cognitive processes, culture, and social structures were produced in interaction, their effects and consequences, indeed their very presence must be demonstrated in the interaction. This commitment led microethnographers to show how inequality occurred in the interaction between teachers and students or testers and students or counselors and students.

Technological developments aided this new line of inquiry. Videotape cameras and recorders had become small enough to be transported and used in schools, hospitals, courtrooms. Microethnographers 'schlepped' their equipment to schools, homes, and clubs to videotape social interactions there. The videotape, or transcripts made from them, served as the material for analysis and were often placed in research reports to illustrate and warrant conclusions. The speech recorded in classroom and other educational settings became the material for analysis and data for presentation.

The methodological commitment to show the phenomenon in the interaction produces vexing methodological difficulties and paradoxes, however. Doing microethnography (or perhaps the more general problem of doing ethnography inside one's own culture) apparently commits a person to the study of phenomena which, upon analysis, often become radically reformulated.

McDermott [ 1976] spent a year conducting fieldwork in a school and a second year analyzing films taken from one first-grade classroom, but could not find anything that looked like learning to read, the phenomenon McDermott set out to study. Certainly children worked on what would be called reading for a few seconds here and there, but mostly they talked with each other, handled classroom procedural demands, did identity work and maintained borders between in- and out-groups.

Mehan [1979] examined classroom lessons from Cazden's classroom, looking for the teacher's differential treatment of students by gender and ethnicity, found instead a more compelling interactional practice: `Getting through'. To be sure, the teacher called on some boys more than girls, some black children more than Latino children, but mostly the teacher and the students were organized to get through the practicality of classroom lessons.

Sociocultural researchers [Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, LCHC, 1983] set out to find various kinds of thinking as they naturally unfolded in the classroom, in after-school clubs, and the like. Instead they found that adults and children worked on many tasks simultaneously, including their identity and the academic tasks set before them. In a particularly poignant description, Hood et al. [1980] show how children and the LCHC researchers themselves unintentionally colluded to produce a child's learning disability in a variety of settings.

Following the lead of Hood et al. [1980], Newman et al. [1989] went looking for 'attending', 'remembering' and `problem solving' in a variety of settings. They found that children and adults did many things together, and some subset of that behavior could be called remembering, thinking, or problem solving, but it was not easy to know which individual was working on what task. This group of researchers found it was especially difficult to trace the `same task' across different contexts.

Anderson-Levitt [1987] said she `had expected to track, with the aid of a video camera, nitty-gritty cues in ongoing classroom behavior by which French first-grade teachers made judgments about their pupils' progress in reading'. Instead she `found that the teachers' interpretations of classroom incidents depended less on specific cues than on their prior theories about the children'.

Ethnography, even the kind that focuses on the organization of individual behavior one film frame at a time, does not make phenomena automatically available analytically. This paradox reinforces a basic interactional finding: Behavior is not private, it is social; social interaction is less about the individual than it is about the world that people hold together for each other. And the social world is held together in ways that defy simplistic conceptions.

Unresolved Issues and Future Directions

The pioneering studies of face-to-face interaction in educational settings contribute to new images of human behavior, propose that social and cognitive structures are constructed in interaction, and demonstrate that human behavior is context-bound. Interactional analysis of classroom discourse coupled with home/school and cross-cultural comparisons of discourse generated pedagogical strategies to make instruction culturally compatible.

This is an impressive list of accomplishments. Yet there are significant issues that lie unresolved in the field. Including social structure in interactional analysis is one. Reconceptualizing learning as a contested process is another. Resolving these issues will guide future work.

Challenging Cultural Patterns and Social Structure with Interactional Analysis

Interactional analysis has been criticized for a radical contextualism. While given credit for elegantly reporting on locally organized social organization and showing the negotiated character of the social order, interactional analysis, it is said, (1) neglects the role of power; (2) overlooks culture, and (3) ignores or under-represents the influence of the constraints imposed by the political economy [Apple, 1982; Foley, 1991, 1992; Giroux, 1983 Kabel and Halsey;1977; MacLaren, 1989; Ogbu,1987; Weis, 1985; 19901.

Power. The criticism that interactional analysis has neglected power is surprisingly off the mark. From the earliest studies to the present, the workings of power have been demonstrated in teacher-student interaction, tester-student interaction, and counselorstudent interaction. Labov's [1970] analysis of language assessment under varying conditions of adult authority, my [1973,1978] analysis of testers' differential application of hints and cues to different students, Michaels' [ 1981 ] analysis of a teacher's differential treatment of narratives presented by a Black and a White student, Erickson and Shultz's [1982] analysis of the differential distribution of counseling information, McDermott's [ 1976] and Gumperz and Herasimchuk's [ 1975] analysis of the differential treatment of students in top and bottom reading groups are but a few interactional studies that have shown how power works in educational settings.

Culture. The criticism that interactional analysis has neglected culture is also misdirected. Gee et al. [ 1992] correctly point out that rituals, routines, traditions, roles, folk theories, and cultural models constitute part of the cultural dimension of the wider context that constrain the spontaneity of speech.

Political-Economic Constraints. In recent work interactional analysts have explicitly considered the influence of political, economic, and institutional constraints of faceto-face social interaction. This move brings them into dialog with political analyses of educational inequality.

Political theorists bring to our attention the press of the political economy and the constraints imposed on social action by institutional arrangements [Apple, 1982; Apple and Weis, 1983; Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Coleman et al., 1966; Foley, 1991, 1992; Giroux, 1983; MacLaren, 1989; MacLeod, 1987; Passeron, 1977; Weis, 1985, 1990; Willis, 1977]. These theoretical ideas are exciting and certainly on target, but research generated from the political perspective is often methodologically impoverished. That is, after we recognize the importance of the political economy, institutional arrangements and social stratification, we face a serious methodological challenge: How do we show the 'work' of capitalism, the force of the political economy, and the power of institutional arrangements in the interaction between people in concrete social situations?

Wilcox's [ 1982] comparison of teacher-student interaction in a working-class and a middle-class school is one of the few studies in the political tradition that examines moment-to-moment pieces of interaction. Her data show how hard it is to see the work of capitalist reproduction in concrete social settings. The teacher in a middle-income school encouraged her students to study hard by using injunctions about their future lives, while the teacher in a working-class school disciplined her students with appeals to her personal authority, practices that Wilcox says are socializing the students to their future occupational roles. Activities have multiple meanings, however, not all of which can be defined exclusively as preparing working class youth for their place on the Ford shop floor or at the McDonald's service counter. The teacher in the working-class school, for example, organized her classroom into small, self-directed groups, while the teacher in the middle-class school employed more traditional, teacher-centered patterns. Therefore, it can be argued that the teacher of working-class students was preparing her students for the `new capitalism', because cooperative work, not blind obedience, is just what managerial jobs in the `information age' require [Gee, 1996].

Political theorists applaud the political savvy of working-class youth [Foley, 1990; MacLeod, 1987; Weis, 1990; Willis, 1977]. Recognizing that there are precious few manufacturing jobs in shrinking capitalist economies, the sons and daughters of the working class 'resist' the prevailing belief that academic achievement leads to occupational success. Willis's [1977] 'lads', MacLeod's [1987] `hallway hangers', and Foley's [1990] vatos seldom attend class. If they do, they arrive late, turn in crumbled assignments, and disrupt lessons. The unwillingness of such working-class youth to participate in education comes from their assessment of the costs and benefits of playing the game. Based on observations of fathers, brothers, and friends out of work, they conclude that schooling will not propel them up the ladder of success; therefore, it is not worth the effort to participate. Given this logic, the oppositional behavior of working-class youth makes sense as a form of resistance to an institution that cannot deliver on its promise of upward mobility for all students.

While research in the political tradition is important because it shows that people actively make choices in life rather than respond passively to socioeconomic pressures bearing down on them, political theorists tend to romanticize people's nonconformity. Not every instance of student misbehavior is a case of resistance [Brandeau and Collins, 1994; Erickson, 1984, 1987; Mehan et al.,1996; Ogbu,1992]. Subject to multiple interpretations from multiple perspectives, it is not always clear when action is resistance, deviance, or conformance to an alternative code of conduct.

The multiple perspectival nature of human interaction invites us to adopt a new stance concerning ethnographic description. Instead of searching for the single best, presumably value-neutral, disinterested perspective ('objectivism'), or attempting to capture the lived experiences from the participants' point of view ('subjectivism'), a heuristic strategy involves presenting the many points of view participants might have on an activity or event and describing how some points of view achieve dominance over others. Shweder [1996] calls this strategy `the view from manywheres', and I, following Holquist [1984] and Shapiro [1988], have talked about it as the `politics of representation' [Mehan, 1993; cf. Cole, 1996, pp. 326-350]. Adopting this strategy concerning 'resistance' would encourage us to specify, based on careful analyses of social situations, just how ditching school, smoking in the hallway and crumpling homework stem from an articulate critique of relations of domination from the point of view of students, but appear as students goofing off from the point of view of teachers and administrators. Seeing such encounters as contests over meaning would further assist us to understand how certain, often institutionally sanctioned, definitions achieve dominance and are imposed upon the less powerful.

My study of educational decision making [Mehan et al.,1986] was conducted with these issues in mind. I wanted to show the influence of constraints that emanated from social institutions, though far away from immediate circumstances, nevertheless influenced locally organized interactions. In other words, I was trying to show the reflexive interconnections between 'macro' and 'micro' considerations, but without abandoning a micro- for a macro level of analysis. I was convinced that a close analysis of social interaction in the here and now could show the impact of events that take place elsewhere and could show how elements of social structure are generated within social interaction.

I think I was partially successful in this attempt. I was able to show how the legal and fiscal constraints generated by federal special education laws influenced the decision making of educators with students in classroom and testing encounters and placement meetings. Teachers' decisions to refer children for testing were made possible by the categories made available by the historical construction of troublesome behavior as 'disability'. Committees' decisions to place students into various special education programs were constrained by the availability of teachers and classrooms, funds available for diagnosis and treatment, and such mundane, practical considerations as the time and space available to assess students and reach conclusions. Perhaps more satisfying, I was able to show that social actors are not merely puppets dancing on the string of externally imposed constraints; they act in creative ways to produce the best available outcomes for students under trying circumstances. Furthermore, the conditions that organize national, state, and district policy on special education also organize the conditions in schools and classrooms such that parents and teachers interpret students in `learning disability' terms.

Constraints originating at a distance from the classroom also influence teacherstudent interaction [Anderson-Levitt, 1987; Cohen, 1994; Tharp and Gallimore, 1988]. As I reported above, differences in the organization of classroom interaction have been found in some cultures. At one level, they seem significant, and illustrate once again the mystery of cross-cultural variation. Viewed at a different level, these differences are little more than variations on a theme. Classroom instruction uniformly takes place in confined physical spaces and circumscribed time segments. Teachers uniformly organize instruction and call upon students to demonstrate their knowledge.

Classroom interaction varies within narrow parameters because it is not easy to escape the constraints imposed upon the teaching-learning setting: First and foremost, schools are a part of education in industrialized societies which means teachers develop their particular recipes for teaching within limits that are beyond their control. The length of the school day and school year, the number of students per class, the agegraded system, and the availability of certain teaching materials are all established by the state. Public expectations (e.g., that students can read by the end of the first grade, meet college entrance requirements by the end of high school, etc.) reinforce these stateorganized constraints.

There are culturally specific constraints, to be sure. French teachers, for example, operate within a highly competitive examination system which, in turn, exerts pressure on teachers at the elementary level to make judgments about passing or retaining individual students at the end of the year [Anderson-Levitt, 1987]. US high school teachers teach with the knowledge that colleges and universities (to say nothing of well-to-do parents) expect a certain amount of literature, mathematics and science to be 'covered', which discourages instructional systems that are built on peer tutoring and group evaluation. By and large then, we see similar features appear again and again in the formal teaching-learning situations we call classrooms because of constraints created in situations that reside far away from the immediate teaching environment.

The move to incorporate political and economic aspects of social context within interactional analysis is a work in progress. Interactional analysts continue to wrestle with the vexing issues associated with the exercise of power, institutional constraints, and the like.

Reconceptualizing Learning as a Contested Process

By formulating expert-novice interaction as the topic of investigation, the sociocultural tradition departs significantly from American psychology, which tends to focus upon individuals and internal mental processes. By studying complex classroom instruction in mathematics, science, and language arts, resarchers in the sociocultural tradition have documented problem solving, inquiry and sense making by students, including those from historically subjugated groups, that exceed stereotypic expectations.

The sociocultural tradition often has a particular conception of teacher-learner interaction, however. Teaching and learning is represented as a consensual process that proceeds effortlessly from knowledgeable experts to inexperienced novices. In this `beneficent' view of interaction [Litowitz, 1990; Panofsky, 1995], perfectly orchestrated dyads of willing teachers and eager students move smoothly through the learning process.

This beneficent view of interaction is quite different from the view often presented in microethnographies and `critical ethnographies' in which conflict and resistance characterize the relations between teachers and students from low-income and ethnic or linguistic minority backgrounds. In the microethnographic tradition, teachers and students, parents and their children have been found trying to avoid reading, homework and other painful interactions [McDermott, 1976; McDermott et al., 1978, 1984]. Students work on their social relationships while the teacher works to organize academic instruction [Mehan, 1980]. Teachers and students often must exert considerable effort to keep lessons flowing [Bremme,1982; Mehan,1979; Shultz et al.,1979]. In the critical ethnographic tradition, students from historically subordinated groups are routinely portrayed as resisting and withdrawing from academic life because they do not see benefits accruing from their hard work [Foley, 1990, 1991; MacLaren, 1989; MacLeod, 1987; Weis, 1985, 1990; Willis, 1977].

Contestation and identity work are not entirely absent from the sociocultural tradition. Hood et al. [ 1980] show how a learning disabled student fought desperately to hide his difficulty in answering a question in an 'IQ Bee' by cleverly manipulating contextual cues and his partners. Rogoff [1990, pp. 173-176] notes the importance of conflict in the development of intersubjectivity. Reddy [1995] displays the tensions between what students and teachers want to get out of science lessons. Panofsky [ 1994,1995] shows us interactions in which parents and children fight over book-reading. In these studies, children do not willingly acquiesce to the adult's taking the lead in turning pages or establishing topics for discussion. They often resist the act of learning entirely, or trade learning time for favors. As a result, adults have to work hard to keep children on their laps, at the table, or in the scene.

Resistance is not limited to interactions between children from low status families and teachers from higher status groups. As any middle-class parent knows, organizing the academic orientation and study time of middle school and high school students, even those from families that presumably possess the cultural capital [Bourdieu, 1986] for status maintenance or upward mobility is a constantly contested process. This is an important consideration because researchers in the critical ethnography tradition associate conflict and resistance with relations between teachers and children from historically subordinated groups. Linking resistance only to subordinated groups is dangerous, because it can stigmatize their actions as abnormal or pathological [Panofsky,1995].

Why then have struggle, contestation, and resistance been absent from many sociocultural studies of learning? It is not because of gaps or glissandos in sociocultural theory. Among intellectual forebearers, Bakhtin [1981] certainly presents a conflictual world view. Perhaps a combination of sampling and political orientation is to blame. In their exuberance to show us learning in the zone of proximal development and/or showing children from subordinated groups in a positive light, sociocultural researchers present only the good news. We see snippets of inquiry, higher order thinking, and sense making, but not the incredible amount of back-stage preparation, the in situ disciplining, behavior management, and improvisation that is necessary to carry off any teachinglearning interaction, but especially complex instruction [Cohen, 1994; Foster, 1995; Reddy, 1995; Tharp and Gallimore, 1988].

A smooth and seamless conception of teaching and learning develops when trouble is seen as an epiphenomenon, not a part of the phenomenon itself. Because children often resist guidance, because children often must be actively recruited to participate in the teaching-learning process, and because experts often have to expend concerted efforts to keep the teaching-learning process flowing, we must see trouble differently. Trouble is an essential feature of teaching-learning interaction; it is always there, a feature that defies our attempts to correct it, or repair it, or make it disappear.

If we see trouble or conflict as an essential feature of interaction, then we must modify our world view about teaching and learning. Recognizing the necessity of this shift in vision, Panofsky [ 1995] calls for a model of `negotiated participation' to replace the model of `guided participation' [Rogoff et al.,1993] that presently dominates sociocultural theory. While I prefer the concept of `contested negotiation' because it foregrounds the inevitable tension and conflict in teaching and learning, Panofky's move is on the mark because reconceptualizing learning as a contested process will better assist an understanding of the interactional work that guides the moment-to-moment accomplishment of educational inequality.

Conclusions

The pioneering studies of face-to-face interaction in educational settings contribute to new images of human behavior and the organization of schooling, inform us how members of society and researchers alike contribute to educational inequality, and help us account for the political economics of the ideology that delivered the problem in the first place. Interactional researchers present compelling evidence that social and cognitive structures are constructed in interaction and human behavior is context bound. Some social situations, especially tests and experiments, are particularly constraining and seem to conspire to show children from subjugated groups to be stupid and inexpressive. Interactional analysis of classroom discourse coupled with home/school and cross-cultural comparisons of language use has led to the development of pedagogical strategies to make classroom instruction culturally compatible.

This is an impressive list of accomplishments. Yet there are significant issues to be resolved in the field. Better understanding the interconnections between social structure, culture, and social interaction and reconciling the conflictual and consensual dimensions of learning are significant issues that will guide future interactional analysis in educational settings.

Acknowledgment

I gratefully acknowledge the extremely helpful comments of Kati Anderson-Levitt, Michael Cole, Ray McDermott, Barbara Rogoff, and the anonymous reviewers from Human Development

[Footnote]
t This is an expanded version of an invited paper presented at the 1996 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, the theme of which was 'retrospection'.
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[Author note]
Hugh Mehan UnFr of California, San Diego, Calif., USA
[Author note]
Hugh Mehan Sociology and Education, UCSD La Jolla, CA 92093-0070 (USA) Tel. +1 619 534 1680, Fax +1 619 534 2462 E-Mail bmehan@ucsd.edu


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