ABSTRACT
If we are to make sense of what goes on in any conversation, we need to have some idea of what people are trying to achieve. This includes not only the particular outcomes they hope will be achieved by the particular interaction, but also how they construe the activity they are engaged in, and how they think such activities should be carried out. One important source of reference for the meaning of any social activity is culture, and culture also provides guidelines for how to behave appropriately in particular contexts; the activity, or conversation, is defined as a particular kind of event, such as ‘making friends’, ‘buying and selling’, ‘teaching and learning’, and so on, and pursued accordingly. The importance of such matters has long been recognized by anthropologists but, as we noted in chapter 2, only recently by sociologists of education, some of whom consequently adopted anthropologists’ ethnographic methods of enquiry. Some psychologists concerned with educational issues have also given particular attention to cultural meanings. A good example of this kind of research is that of Michael Cole and his associates (e.g. Cole and Scribner 1974; Scribner and Cole 1981), in their investigations of educational problem-solving and literacy. Unlike the microsociologists, however, psychologists engaged in classroom research have not given much attention to cultural definitions of teaching and learning. In this chapter, we try to provide some cultural context for the teaching-and-learning activities that we observed.
