ABSTRACT
How do the dilemmas represent the connections between everyday school life and social and cultural reproduction and change, or, in the language of social science, between the micro and the macro? Our answer is in three parts. We show how the dilemmas may be used, first, to examine the meanings children take from teachers’ actions; second, to explore the origins of teachers’ actions in their histories and the situation; third, to inquire into the relationship of the meanings children take from schooling to social stability and change. These questions have been explored by many social researchers over the decades. 1 Our purpose in these analyses is not to contribute original or definitive answers to these problems but to demonstrate how the dilemma language (and the general approach it represents) may he used to penetrate some of the uncertainties and confusions that surround these questions.
Mrs Martin tells Cheryl, ‘I think you are now ready for your Janet and John.’ In the subsequent weeks, we see her tell several children who had mastered the sight vocabulary in the readers that they are ‘ready’, and she gives them their ‘normal readers’. On a given morning she may say ‘Andrea’ or ‘David, you haven’t read yet’, reminding them to come to her desk so she can listen to them read from their readers, [summarized from our field notes]
Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism. [George Herbert Mead]
We assume as fact that persons take meaning from everyday experience. To consider some familiar examples, as Mrs Martin gives Janet and John readers to children who demonstrate to her satisfaction that they can perform a particular set of operations, and, through her words and other gestures, indicates they are now ‘ready’, they take from her the generally accepted definition of what it means to be ready to advance to a higher status position in the classroom group. As children hear her call the names of those who have not ‘read’ today, though many children have read cereal boxes, the traffic signs and, most significantly, may have read to her their own ‘news’, from such acts they take her meaning of ‘read’ – reading the school reader. As they experience the sequence of events that leads to receiving their Janet and John and come to know their location in the sequence, they take the school’s definition of how clever or dim they are relative to others. One must not, we think, in efforts to understand schools’ contribution to social continuity and change, discount the possible impact of such events which occur during children’s first encounters with a public institution and an authority figure whom many initially call ‘mum’.