Understanding public school teachers' accounts of conflicts: An ethnographically based, ethnomethodological investigation.

Abstract

The data for this project are narrative descriptions or accounts of conflict episodes written by public school teachers. Two categories of research within the Language and Social Interaction tradition---the ethnography of communication (EC) and ethnomethodology (EM)---provide the conceptual framework for the study. The report divides the findings into descriptions of teachers' conflicts with fellow teachers and descriptions of teachers' conflicts with their administrators. The study reports some general features of accounted teacher conflicts including the typical subject matter of conflicts, who is involved in the conflicts, where they may take place, and the manner and tone with which they take place. Additionally the study identifies norms or rules regarding the conduct of persons in a school community that are derived from teachers' accounts of conflict. Finally, the study includes claims about teachers' accounts of conflict that demonstrate teachers' use of "conflict" as a cultural category, namely that teachers: (a) treat conflict as a negative event; (b) attend to the idea of closure or resolution; (c) orient to the issue of their culpability or blameworthiness concerning conflict episodes; (d) characterize conflicts in militaristic terms and focus on conflict outcomes in terms of winners and losers; (e) talk about conflict in a manner that displays their low-power status relative to administrators. The final chapter discusses the findings within the theoretical frameworks of ethnography of communication and ethnomethodology and suggests directions for further research.