How Teachers Talk about Strict Disciplining in the Context of Ambiguous School Rules:

<p>The aim of this paper is to use an ethnomethodological approach to explain how teachers produce strict disciplining cooperatively in the context of ambiguous school rules by referring to the norms and history of their school. The main data for this paper were collated for one year from April 2009 in a public junior high school.<br><br>In particular, I will focus on a school code that regulates the color of a student’s bag. This rule was not written clearly in the students’ handbook, the phrase used being “not gaudy”, but actually some teachers warned students against bringing bags that were not black to school. One parent asked why her child was warned about the color of her gray bag. This incident caused a controversy among the teachers.<br><br>Some discussions among the teachers showed that they shared an intermediate category for disciplining students. Some unwritten rules, like the bag-color code, were included in this category. This category made teachers responsible for enforcing a norm, so they found themselves in a situation where they had to discipline students cooperatively not through written rules but through a common understanding, i.e., a certain autonomy took priority over their written duties. This norm, embedded inside the intermediate category, was the test of the teachers’ pro-active cooperation not the product of a compromise between the ambiguous school rules and strict disciplining. Additionally, teachers referred to other norms like red-tape-ism and anti-discipline-oriented education, but they did not give up disciplining students strictly without any written rules. This showed that the norms did not in themselves cause their actions since, besides these norms, teachers referred to two kinds of history when it came to disciplining. One was their past experience and history of disciplining over the unwritten code of color which the proponents of disciplining students over the bag-color code referred to in order to excuse their warning. The other, which opponents referred to, was the decade of effort to overcome discipline-oriented education with trivial rules. In fact, both proponents and opponents could refer to the history of their efforts for and against strict disciplining. This shows the school’s history did not correspond directly to any special result about disciplining and could not direct teachers’ interactions. Rather, teachers created a sense of history retrospectively though their local interactions. They constructed norms and history in context and referred to these norms and history as they composed them reflexively in the context of their local interaction.</p>