ABSTRACT
From the very beginning of life, interpretations – the meanings to be accorded to things – are offered and exchanged between infants and their caregivers. As babies grow into childhood, the conversational confirmations, challenges, comparisons, interrogations of personal meaning develop at a geometrical rate. A widening social experience brings awareness of competing realities, alternative constructions. A Kellyan approach stands apart from most educational psychology, which, while generally focusing on the distinctive ways in which individual pupils see things, tends to lump teachers together. For most people familiar with personal construct psychology, it is the repertory grid technique which defines the approach par excellence. This is essentially a categorization, or sorting task, in which a number of items are judged in terms of dimensions that can be applied to them. From statistical associations among the judgements made, conceptual linkages are inferred.
