Managing knowledge in parent-teacher conferences: participants' resources to pursue different assessment trajectories

As institutional interactions, parent-teacher conferences are the “typical” milieu where teacherstry to enact their professional oriented identity. This paper reports data from a mother-teachersconference where two teachers talk with a mother about the school achievements of her giftedchild. Data were analyzed following the multimodal Conversation Analysis techniques. Theauthors advance that, as the interacting parts talk about the child, these social actors followtwo different assessment trajectories. While teachers pursue a no-problem trajectory, constructingthe “child-at-school” as a relatively non-problematic pupil, the mother pursues a problem tra-jectory by framing the troublesome “child-at-home”. Analyses illustrate how the mother’scommunicative strategies allow her to act as a “final arbiter” of the conference, demanding andgetting a customized education for her child.