Teacher as Mediator: How Teacher Interacts with Parents of the Victim and Agent in School Conflict

What is it about?

This paper is a conversational analytic study of teacher-parent mediation based on two telephone calls in which the teacher talks to the parents whose sons were involved in a fight at school on the day when the calls were made. We have showcased how the teacher and parents collaboratively construct the mediation call as a moment-by-moment interactional achievement, in which the teacher’s institutional goal of mediating is realized after overing various contingencies. Data analyses are divided into three sections, namely, how the teacher in a calibrated way attributes responsibility to the two students in her mediation calls to the parents, how the parents weaken their own as well as their children’s responsibility and construct “good parent” and “good child” images, and how a “turning point” in mediation is pinned down for a successful mediation, with mutual alignment and affiliation from the teacher and parents. This research is innovative in bring teacher-parent medication into conversation analytic studies. The current paper embodies CA’s spirit of doing contrastive analyses.

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