ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the concept of coping strategies helps us consider both the wider forces in society as a whole which determine the constraints, and teachers' own resources and creativity in dealing with them. In linking features of the social structure to issues in the classroom, and in noting how the former impinge upon or even shape the latter, there are good reasons for selecting the teacher as the starting point of investigation. The addition of the word 'coping' to that of 'strategy' implies that there are limits to the variety of styles which teachers may adopt in the classroom. The presence of corridors with classrooms leading off as a set of disparate, physically autonomous units offers few opportunities for innovatory progressive teaching practice. Classroom and society are inextricably bound together in a tangled web which ad hoc reformism weaves around the enduring centre of hierarchical social relations in British capitalist society.
