Teaching and Learning as the Creation of Meanings

When we engage in some form of social interaction, like a conversation, we assume that the situation we face means the same to us as to the person (or persons) we are talking to. We assume that we both draw on the same body of commonsense knowledge to interpret what the other says and does. Yet, because we are all individuals with different biographies and possibly separate interests, we may well have different perspectives on the situation at hand. But if we are to maintain social interaction, we will either have to gloss over or suspend these differences, or else establish new meanings we both can accept. ¹ What the Humanities teachers [referred to in an earlier chapter] were doing in the first weeks of the autumn term was explicitly establishing a common sense of classroom organization. This organizational talk was itself dependent on another body of knowledge—about classroom relationships—which teachers assumed they already held in common with their pupils. Their organizational talk subsumed within it, and was dependent for its comprehensibility on, this common relationship knowledge. After the first few weeks a reciprocity of perspectives about classroom organization was assumed too, and as long as that assumption was maintained, explicit references to procedure largely disappeared from the transcripts. That too could become part of the background knowledge participants were assumed to fill in appropriately when they engaged in curriculum talk.