This paper is about Greek university students’ violation of the smoking law in public venues and their understanding of rights, duties and responsibilities. Thirty-one students (21 smokers) were interviewed and asked to describe and discuss their own and other students’ behaviour in relation to smoking in closed public places in terms of rights and duties. Additional material from the printed and electronic press has been used to provide a context to the students’ statements. Participant-smokers’ systematic violations of the smoke-free law spring from a peculiar view of rights, duties and responsibilities. Both behaviour and its theoretical underpinnings are reinforced in the context of the students’ leisure time “community of practice.” All those involved, that is, cafe owners/staff, customers and law-enforcers, contribute to encouraging smoking by rewarding those who violate the law and discouraging law-abiding behaviours. The authorities in charge usually avoid monitoring public venues for transgressions, which reduces to a minimum the danger of being caught and sanctioned. Cafe owners/staff tolerate smoking, which is interpreted as informal permission. Smokers invoke both customers’ behaviour and the staff’s tolerance as a justification for their own violations of the law. The paper ends with considerations about the status of school knowledge: somewhat weak if compared to the compelling authority of the informal knowledge people acquire in everyday interactions.
This paper describes instances of teaching preschool children about diversity among human groups, as it has taken place in some kindergartens in a Greek town. The focus is on the categories used and on the way they are proposed, questioned, accepted, refused or legitimated by the teachers and pupils taking part in the interaction. The paper analyses eight reports written by trainee teachers in a preschool education department at a Greek university, which describe classroom activities and report classroom dialogues. Teaching relies on stereotypes and a strict classi cation of human kind into four races that the trainees defend against occasional attempts to 'defy' them on the part of the children. The paper contends that teacher training should include sensitising courses that provide perspectives on race, ethnicity, culture and nationality. Trainee teachers would thus have access to conceptual and linguistic resources more suitable for dealing with the topic of human diversity.
The paper applies Goffman’s frame analysis and ethnomethodology to student performance on mathematical word problems. In educational research, frame analysis has usually been limited to primary frames. Instead, in this paper I focus on the kind of secondary frame that Goffman calls ‘utilitarian make-believe’. The data consist of a fragment of verbal interaction between a teacher and a 12-year-old pupil during an oral mathematics exam. By evoking the idea of ‘as-ifness’, word problems introduce pupils to a make-believe world. The text consists only of ‘filler words’ because what really matters are the figures. Word problems and possibly other aspects of schooling can be interpreted in terms of a utilitarian make-believe key. Readiness to adopt this make-believe frame when required may be the difference between school success and failure. I argue that maths achievement takes more than just ‘being good with numbers’. It is a joint enterprise of people interacting within a culturally-shaped setting, organized so as to make some phenomena stand out rather than others. Finally, I argue that ‘word problems and possibly other ‘school genres’ could be added to the list of utilitarian make-believe frames provided by Goffman.
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