ABSTRACT
Because the conclusions we draw are made within the framework of ethnomethodology, the task is to draw out interpretations for which the data provide a warrant. In this Part we documented layerings of comparabilities and contrasts across school sites. For example, in the student group talk, students routinely enacted cohorting, which was attributed also to the Child-Student in whole class talk in different ways. Consider how available is the conclusion that the macro configuration (the whole class) drove the micro (the student group). That is, consider how strong the temptation is to conclude that the students at Aralia College told stories, chatted and joked while they worked in student groups because relating anecdotes and chatting were routinely a feature of the Aralia College whole class system of talk. However, to insinuate that hierarchies of causation were at work would be incompatible with our theoretical bases. A warrant for naming the accomplishment of an attribute in one site as the cause of the same or different attribution in some other site is provided by the participants’ orientation to such causation. As Schegloff (1991) has argued, it is not provided by the observation that one situation is more macro (or indeed micro)1 than the other. Taken together, the contrasts demonstrate that the category Child-Student is a locally driven category Even though there were a number of presuppositions about the category made relevant across the sites, category attributes were shown to be qualitatively different across the varying sites. Specifically, attributes were shown to be different from classroom to classroom, from student to student, from moment to moment, and from work configuration to work configuration. The category Child-Student might be labelled more precisely, ‘Child-Student for Aralia College whole class’ or ‘Child-Student for St Luke’s School student group configuration’. These analyses are a demonstration that the social order, the rights and responsibilities and the attributes of the student participants in the classroom moments we studied were achieved through the interactive processes of the participants and furthermore, were made to stand as real through those same processes.
