Mehan, Bud Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1979

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1. in the 1960s Phil Jackson and the call for ethnographies of schooling after a long career in school psychology
   1. in fact there already existed quite a number of significant school ethnographies
      1. Lynd & Lynd
      2. Hollingshead
      3. Henry
2. the convergence between anthropological linguistics (sociolinguistics),
   1. conversational analysis and ethnomethodology, and the goal of directly observing what is happening in classrooms. After all, what do teachers and students do with each other: they talk, they make each other talk, they converse, and they they mete consequences. Whatever will be one's interpretation of the relationship between social differentiation, schooling, learning, and the reproduction of the differentiations, the mechanisms involve a moment where practical activity is mostly a matter of language (talking, writing, etc.).
   2. demonstrating the statistical relationship between initial class position of a child and adult class position after the passage through schooling is interesting but leaves the school as a kind of black box. Bourdieu and the others can only make the call to observe what is going on more urgent. Their methods cannot tell us what actually is happening in schools.
   3. thus works like those by
      1. Cazden et al. Functions of language in the classroom
      2. McDermott et al.
      3. Erickson et al
3. Mehan and the structuring of interaction within "learning lessons"
   1. focusing of that part of the total life of teachers and children in school that are most marked for "teaching/learning": the testing sequences
      1. of course, this is but a moment in the total life of adult (teacher?) and child (student?) in school
      2. using the word "learning" must provoke thinking on the part of observers:
   2. given the focus on testing, an emphasis on the fact that t&c are performing the scene together
      1. this is the great advance in that it moves attention away from the child and on to the dance (interaction), its properties, and, in later works, on the properties of the more encompassing dance (interaction) within which a testing sequences makes sense and it is in fact required that it be publicly known that the testing has happened (even if it has not, quite)
      2. the roots in pragmatism, particularly G.H. Mead on the conversation of gestures;
         1. meaning is determined by the next gesture--probably not performed by the original actor, and in fact often not even performed by the original dancers but by a "third" (observer, evaluator)
            1. "determination" here must be understood as a temporary, though immortal, process:
               1. temporary given that any further "third" can propose that what happened is something else than what the original actor(s) may have intended it to mean, or had agreed that it meant
               2. immortal given that all determinations of meaning ("this is what is meant") will constrain next speakers--even if they are most powerful. In other words, all "third" acts are bound to acknowledge the existence of the first two--if they want to be known as relevant to what originally happened, whatever the "third" may be attempting to determine it must have meant.
   3. "What time is it?"
   4. modeling an interactional pattern to highlight its consequences for ordering polities of practice (i.e. reproduction of a "social structure" ensuring that some will not get as much resources/power than others)
4. Methodological note
   1. finding a structural link within a set of repeated observations in arguably related settings.
      1. emphasize the need to argue that a bunch of observations not randomly chosen from a set of events actually belong to a set. This cannot quite be determined a priori

 

 

Some questions
StudyPlace conversation
what else is going on in classrooms besides "learning lessons"? what arguments could you make for the legitimacy of using the word "learning" for what Mehan is describing? should I have used the word "validity" rather than the word "legitimacy" in the preceding question? What difference does using either word make?