ABSTRACT
Within the theme of ‘Teacher Thinking and Subject Knowledge’ I wish to deconstruct a conflict between two Dutch exchange students and their British lecturers. The sociotexts of the students and lecturers conflicted; two different concepts of the social organisation of knowledge were revealed. The postmodern assumption to be made here is that subject matter mastery veils prescribed models for manipulating sociotext. Normally the legitimacy of the text and/or the manipulation is, more or less, unconditionally accepted. But international exchange programmes, such as Erasmus, threaten the symbiosis of power and subject knowledge. Exchange students are confronted with situations wherein their sociotext fails them and lecturers are faced with students who will have no truck with prevailing discourse. Following discussion on the theory of teacher thinking, I will examine a specific case of the social enactment of academic power.
