Assessing a (gifted) child in parent-teacher conference: Participants’ resources to pursue (and resist) a no-problem trajectory

Delivering and acknowledging assessments are the most recurrent institutional activities occurring in parent-teacher conference. This paper reports data from a mother-teacher conference concerning a gifted child. We show how participants’ practices to accomplish and receive assessment in the report-assessment phase of the event: (a) display their relative epistemic and deontic rights, (b) are oriented to participants’ institutional relevant identities, and (c) project or even enact different and quite opposite assessment trajectories. We contend that struggles in assessing the child display participants’ different stances: teachers’ ‘normalizing’ and ‘group oriented’ trajectory vs. and the mother’s orientation toward ‘doctorability’ and pressure for individualized treatment. Although typically occurring between routinecase oriented institutions vs. idiosyncratic-case oriented clients, such a struggle displays also the ‘paradoxical injunctions’ that frame teachers’ everyday work: adopting a ‘group-oriented’ perspective while at the same time being accountable for an individualized approach.