Closing down openings: Pretextuality and misunderstanding in parent–teacher conferences with Mexican immigrant families

This paper examines a video-recorded corpus of kindergarten teachers’ conferences with Mexican-origin families in a peri-urban setting in the Northeastern United States. Examining the pretextual conditions and the communicative repertoires that families and teachers brought to these conferences, we found that the format and conditions of the encounter hindered teachers’ and parents’ flexible mobilization of their full range of communicative resources. In particular, the discourses of parent–teacher conferences, specialist pedagogical terminology, and institutional agendas that teachers deployed led to miscommunication and a lack of rapport building. We argue that teachers and parents could more flexibly deploy their available communicative repertoires to maneuver these encounters.