Student-teacher conferencing in Swedish upper secondary school: Dimensions of dominance and relations between perspectives in institutional discourse

Student-teacher conferences are mandatory in Swedish upper secondary school. Steering documents prescribe that these conversations should be characterised by equality between the interlocutors and “dialogue” is presented as an ideal for these interactions. This is a challenging task since this institutional discourse actualises the formal roles of student and teacher, and the interlocutors' relationship is inherently asymmetrical. This paper presents findings from an empirical study of audiotaped student-teacher conferences. By drawing on the concepts of perspectivisation and dominance the findings highlight ways that perspectives are related to each other in the conferences. The results show that the teachers' interactional role in the conversations was characterised by interactional dominance, while forms that had been filled out in preparation were used as tools that mediated student-teacher interaction and dominated the conferences semantically. Results pertaining to dominance and perspectivisation are further presented in terms of: perspective elicitation in the conversations; validation of the student perspective; playing down of asymmetry; and the ways that verticality between perspectives is established. It is concluded that when using guidelines involving self-assessment in a routine way as an agenda, the conferences acquires an educational and formative character rather than the open exploratory character prescribed in policy documents.