Introduction

The classroom with its forms of pupil differentiation, and its modes of teacher control was the major focus of the new sociology of education. One problem with the ethnography of teaching is that it is prone to treating the school or the classroom as if it existed in a social or cultural vacuum, unaffected by the economic demands, political pressures and social influences of the wider society. For symbolic interactionists, people do not respond automatically and unthinkingly to any stimulus or pressure they are subjected to, but they make sense of these pressures in terms of frameworks of meaning they have built up through their lives and come to share with others. The Chicago interactionist and ethriomethodological traditions with their respective emphases on control as against order, strategies as against rules, provide two of the most powerful influences on contemporary ethnographic work.