Toward a Theory of Student Status as Socially Constructed. Occasional Paper No. 88.

This paper serves as a prologue to three case studies exemplifying instances in which the status of a student in the classroom was socially constructed by the teacher and the attitudes of other students. In each case the student was considered as a "problem" in the classroom. It is noted that teachers appear to include in their judgements of children not only such attributes of student status as academic ability socially constructed, but also such attributes as social class, race, gender, and family normality. The main aim of this research was to discover how different teachers in the primary grades learn to observe and make practical sense of what happens in their classroom from day to day. The first case study focuses on interaction between a teacher and a second grade student, and of the subsequent shaping of that student's social and personal identities in the class. The second study is of a boy who became a social pariah in the course of his second grade experience. In the final study, the process is traced of a teacher making a decision to identify a student as in need of special education. Brief analytic discussions accompany each case study. (JD)