ABSTRACT
Teachers – and perhaps teachers of English particularly – are 'third parties' par excellence. In a passage which is particularly pertinent to teachers, Bronfenbrenner writes that the effectiveness of dyadic relationships is 'crucially dependent on the presence and participation of third parties'. Bronfenbrenner describes the next two outer 'circles' of his ecological system thus: The principle of interconnectedness is seen as applying not only within settings but with equal force and consequence to linkages between settings, both those in which the developing person actually participates and those that he may never enter but in which events occur that affect what happens in the person's immediate environment. A Bourdieusian response to the Nazi reading primer exercise might differ from one influenced by the thinking of, for example, Bandura by focusing not so much on how but on why personal agency is deployed in that instance in that particular way.
