ABSTRACT
The problem for sociology addressed in this essay is the problem of ‘knowing’ school classrooms. Even to state the problem thus is to beg the question, what is it to know? It is not my intention to pursue the task of repeated definition which can only end in a tautology, therefore the problem faced is to reach an understanding of classrooms which is relevant both to the teachers and pupils who work there and relevant to sociologists trying to get some purchase on the process at work within classrooms. This essay has both plot and subplot. The main intent is to examine some of the various activities which count as research in classrooms. The research discussed falls into four groups; interaction analysis as developed by Flanders and Amidon; the attempt of Smith to follow Glaser and Strauss's prescription to discover grounded theory; the descriptive anthropologies of King and Wolcott; and finally that research inspired to different degrees by the phenomenological philosophy of Alfred Schutz. The subplot is a concern with the level of understanding possible in sociological inquiry. To what extent is an objective sociology possible without incurring the charges of reification, or reductionism? Clearly any statement made about classrooms has an objectivity; the task facing the social scientist, the point where his work goes beyond the ‘objectivity’ of the novelist or journalist, is that he must make explicit the grounds upon which his objectivity is based, must point out the inferential chain leading to his ‘account’. The weakness of much of the research discussed in this essay is that the grounds of interpretation are not given, or if given have a spurious objectivity based on the correspondence between evidence and the appropriate number system being used, the validity of the number system, its isomorphism to the ‘real world’, remaining unquestioned.
