Narrative constructions of school-oriented parenthood during parent–teacher-conferences

• School consultations open a window on the interplay between the two institutions of school and family home.
• Story fragments are analyzed in terms of teachers’ and parents’ collaboration on the basis of their knowledge of the school's relevance structure.
• I discuss stories as membership categorization practices that typify pupils (Mazeland & Berenst, 2008) and help to classify them within the German school system.
• The problem is not that some parents sometimes disagree with teachers’ judgements and career suggestions, but rather that not all parents are able to position themselves in the highly routinized and consistent stratification system.

This article deals with parent–teacher-conferences in German elementary and secondary schools. Drawing on the frameworks of ethnomethodology and interactional sociolinguistics, it investigates narrative fragments that teachers and parents employ to characterize and assess children and to present themselves in school-oriented identities. Fragmentary stories represent a highly functional communicative means of doing so: They re-stage childrens’ behavior and learning situations and allow parents to portray themselves as urging, correcting and supporting. In jointly developing a mildly critical view on the child, parents and teachers co-construct common ground regarding the norms for objectively assessing the child and his/her achievements and educational perspectives. However, analyses brought to light differences in the degree of common ground established by teachers and parents in terms of the perspectivation of the child as an achiever and the parents as critical and benevolent supporters.