ABSTRACT
This chapter explores exactly how a small group of West Indian girls in a London secondary school do make judgements about their teachers. Following Schutz' analysis, the chapter suggests that typifications emerge when a group of people agree on the 'relevance' of something. The chapter starts from the assumption that pupils' explanations of their own behaviour in class are often of a different order from those of their teachers. Other research has shown that teachers usually 'explain' pupil behaviour in purely educationist terms. Thus rather than refer to the pupils' reality, teachers have a tendency to draw on what they consider to be specialist knowledge to understand why children act as they do. Pupils' typifications can therefore give us some insight into their 'relevance structures'; the knowledge they draw on in order to make judgements about specific classroom situations.
