ABSTRACT
Teachers’ talk about their year’s experience clustered around the two axes of the school programme: learning and behaviour. This chapter presents a study of their talk about learning, and an analysis of their identifications of children’s strategies when defending their behaviour. It identifies the interpretative frameworks the teachers invoked in evaluating their year’s work, and in accounting for the children’s performance, starting with why they come to school. The chapter examines children’s relations with teachers, and Traveller identity in the classroom. Difficulties in relation to behaviour were relatively uncommon and absorbing; difficulties in relation to learning were common and pervasive. In classroom discourse, the children’s preferred learning-related repertoire pair was that of incapacity and accumulation. Impulsivity and blaggarding were terms in both; such activities were sometimes topics of their preferred behaviour-related repertoires of guilt and innocence. The teachers identified the same phenomena, often intertwined, in their versions of pupils’ learning styles and difficulties.
