Reported speech in problem telling: Doing epistemic and moral work in parent–teacher conferences

Like many institutional interactions, parent–teacher conferences are impregnated with a socially sanctioned distribution of epistemic and deontic rights. However, who has the right to know, to assess and to make decisions is less an overarching structural dimension than an interactional local accomplishment. This paper reports data from a research project on parent–teacher conferences that investigated the interactional constitution of a phenomenon increasingly reported by teachers: loss of authority, the systematic delegitimisation of their role. Adopting a conversation-analysis informed approach to a single case study concerning a nine-year-old child, I describe a specific resource – reported speech in problem telling – displayed by the mother during the dialogic phase of the second conference of the school year. We illustrate how, through this conversational resource, the mother accomplishes epistemic and moral work. After making information from her territory of knowledge more relevant than information provided by the teachers, she (1) provides incontestable evidential bases to her ‘problem trajectory’, (2) makes it prevail over the teacher’s ‘no-problem’ trajectory and (3) undermines the teacher’s epistemic authority by vicariously blaming her work. In the discussion, we suggest that the mother’s interactive competence in doing epistemic and moral work can explain why she succeeds in shaping the teacher’s professional conduct. In making the case for microanalysis-based teacher training, in the conclusion we discuss some applied implications of the study