Abstract
This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent–teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student’s trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of ‘routinizing’ – citing first-hand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to pre-empt parent/caregiver resistance to their student assessments/evaluations. This research thus reveals how routinizing licenses teachers’ authority vis-à-vis the focal student’s trouble by making salient the epistemic basis for their claims.