Interactionism and Education: The Social Construction of Learning

Most discussions about education focus on structures – curricula, school funding, government policy. But interactionism takes a different route. It zooms in on the everyday, face-to-face interactions between teachers and students, and asks a deceptively simple question: what actually happens in the classroom, and how does it shape who students become? The answers reveal something important – that learning is not just an academic process, it is a deeply social one, where meanings are constantly constructed, identities are formed, and outcomes are shaped by something as subtle as a teacher’s tone of voice or the table a child is seated at on the first day of school.

What is interactionism? 🔗

Interactionism – more specifically, symbolic interactionism – is a sociological perspective that examines how people create and negotiate meaning through social interaction. Rather than focusing on large-scale structures like the economy or social class systems (the concerns of macro-level theories), interactionism operates at the micro level, studying the small, everyday exchanges between individuals.

The roots of the theory lie in the early 20th century work of philosophers and sociologists like George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley. Mead argued that individuals create their sense of self through interactions with others, and that language and symbols are the key tools through which we interpret the social world. In 1937, his student Herbert Blumer coined the term “symbolic interactionism” and formalized it as a theoretical framework.

Applied to education, the theory helps explain how students develop their identities, how teacher expectations shape behaviour, and why the same classroom experience can mean very different things to different pupils.

How meaning is constructed in the classroom 🔗

In an interactionist framework, the classroom is not simply a place where knowledge is transferred from teacher to student. It is a social environment where meanings are continuously made, negotiated, and revised. Symbols in education are pervasive and influential – grades, diplomas, uniforms, and classroom arrangements all carry significant meanings. A grade is not merely a number; it signals achievement, potential, and social value. Where a student sits in a classroom can communicate – to themselves and others – how “capable” they are perceived to be.

A teacher’s positioning at the front of the room symbolizes control and expertise, while students seated further back may be perceived – or perceive themselves – as less engaged. Even a teacher’s tone of voice, a raised eyebrow, or an enthusiastic nod carries symbolic weight that shapes how students understand themselves as learners.

Teacher expectations and the self-fulfilling prophecy 🔗

One of the most significant contributions of interactionism to education is its analysis of teacher expectations and how they affect student performance. Through what is known as the teacher expectancy effect, a teacher’s expectations of a student’s performance can significantly influence a student’s actual performance, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. When teachers hold low expectations for certain students, those students may internalize those beliefs – and ultimately live down to them.

The most well-known demonstration of this principle is the Pygmalion in the Classroom study conducted by psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in 1968. The experiment investigated how labeling and self-fulfilling prophecies impact student performance at a California elementary school. Teachers were falsely told that a standard IQ test had identified certain students as “intellectual bloomers” likely to surge ahead academically. The so-called “bloomers” gained an average of two IQ points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning, and four points in overall IQ – the experiment showed that teacher expectations worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rosenthal concluded that teachers, believing in their students’ potential, had unknowingly given them more support, encouragement, and positive feedback – creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for success. The reverse is equally true: negative expectations can restrict student development, not because students lack ability, but because the social environment around them has been shaped by a teacher’s limiting belief.

It is worth noting that the Pygmalion study has attracted considerable debate. Researchers have repeatedly found the original effect to be weaker than initially claimed, and a 2005 meta-analysis found that while self-fulfilling prophecies in classrooms do occur, their effects are usually small and temporary. Nevertheless, the study opened a vital conversation about how teacher perceptions shape educational environments – and that conversation remains highly relevant.

Social class, labelling, and the “ideal pupil” 🔗

Interactionism does not just reveal how expectations work – it also shows how those expectations are shaped by social class. Sociologist Howard Becker interviewed 60 Chicago schoolteachers and found that teachers tend to evaluate and label students in terms of their image of an “ideal pupil,” and that teachers perceive students from middle-class backgrounds as closest to this ideal – regardless of actual ability.

This is not simply about academic performance. Appearance, manner of speech, home background, and how “neat and tidy” a student’s work appears all factor into how teachers form their judgements. Teachers are known to label students based on their class background – showing working-class children in a negative light and middle-class pupils in a positive one. These are not conscious decisions of prejudice; they are the product of social conditioning operating through everyday interactions.

Sociologist Ray Rist provided some of the starkest evidence of this in his 1970 study of an American kindergarten classroom. Rist found that the teacher grouped students based on their socio-economic status, creating distinct groups – neat, middle-class students were placed closer to the teacher and received more attention, while students from poor, working-class backgrounds were seated farthest away and treated as low achievers. Crucially, the labels assigned to the students on the eighth day of kindergarten followed them throughout their schooling – the trajectory set in those first weeks proved remarkably persistent.

Labelling theory and student identity 🔗

Labelling theory, which grows directly out of the interactionist tradition, examines how being assigned a label – “troublemaker,” “slow learner,” “gifted” – affects how students see themselves and how others treat them. Low standardized test scores or poor performance in a class often lead to a student being labeled as a low achiever, and such labels are difficult to shake off – they can create a self-fulfilling prophecy and result in outcomes that could have been prevented.

Even outside the formal tracking system, students can be informally labeled as troublemakers, developmentally slow, or poor leaders. Once a child is labeled in this manner, the cycle of reinforcement for that kind of behaviour begins. A child not given leadership roles cannot develop leadership skills – and their relative lack of those skills then appears to confirm the original, baseless assumption.

Sociologist David Hargreaves described the labelling process as unfolding in three stages: speculation (initial assumptions about a student based on visible characteristics), elaboration (testing and building on those assumptions through classroom interactions), and stabilization (where the label becomes fixed and shapes how the teacher consistently relates to the student). A self-fulfilling prophecy can then occur – the student accepts the label, internalizes it, and it becomes a master status they live up to.

The hidden curriculum and social identity 🔗

Beyond explicit labels and teacher expectations, interactionism also draws attention to the hidden curriculum – the informal, unspoken lessons that schools teach alongside their official content. The hidden curriculum refers to the implicit lessons taught in schools about societal norms and behaviours – students learn not just academic content but also the social behaviours deemed appropriate by their culture.

Symbolic interactionist studies show how children’s playground activities reinforce gender-role socialisation – girls tend to play more cooperative games, while boys engage in more competitive sports. These patterns are not taught through textbooks; they are absorbed through interaction and observation. Schools, in this sense, are powerful sites of social identity formation – shaping students’ sense of who they are, what they are capable of, and where they belong.

Symbolic interactionism has been widely applied to studying classroom dynamics, emphasising the importance of identity formation in shaping student learning and outcomes. The student who is consistently praised develops a different academic identity to the one who is consistently overlooked – and those identities, once formed, influence long-term engagement, motivation, and achievement.

Strengths and criticisms of the interactionist approach 🔗

The interactionist perspective offers something that macro-level theories cannot: a close-up, detailed account of how educational experiences are lived. Symbolic interactionism has been praised for its flexibility and applicability across various social contexts, and its focus on meaning and interpretation has made significant contributions to understanding identity formation. It also underpins much of the qualitative research in education – ethnography, participant observation, and in-depth interviews all draw on interactionist principles.

However, the approach has real limitations. Its focus on micro-level interactions makes it difficult to explain macro-level patterns – why working-class students systematically underperform, or how structural inequalities in school funding produce persistent disadvantage. Critics argue that symbolic interactionism needs to be integrated with other theoretical perspectives that can provide a more comprehensive, multi-level analysis of social reality.

It is also important not to overstate labelling’s power. Sociologist Mary Fuller’s 1984 study of working-class Black girls found that some students actively resisted negative labels – working harder precisely to disprove them. Individual agency matters, and not every student simply internalises the expectations placed upon them.

Why the interactionist perspective still matters 🔗

The value of interactionism lies in what it makes visible. It reminds us that educational outcomes are not predetermined by ability or even by social class alone – they are also shaped by the quality and character of everyday interactions. A teacher who holds high expectations, who communicates belief in a student’s potential, and who avoids hasty labels can genuinely alter trajectories. Positive expectations can encourage better outcomes, while negative ones can lead students to internalize limiting beliefs and disengage from learning.

Understanding this is not just theoretically useful. It has direct practical implications for how teachers are trained, how schools handle behavioural issues, and how students from disadvantaged backgrounds are supported. The classroom is not a neutral space – it is a social arena where identities are constructed and futures are shaped, one interaction at a time.

What do you think? If teacher expectations can shape student outcomes so significantly, how responsible are schools for addressing the biases that influence those expectations in the first place? And to what extent can students resist the labels assigned to them – or are some social identities in education simply too difficult to overcome?

References

1. https://www.structural-learning.com/post/symbolic-interaction-theory
2. https://easysociology.com/sociological-perspectives/symbolic-interactionism/the-symbolic-interactionist-view-of-education/
3. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/sociology/sociology-education-theory-symbolic-interactionism
4. https://www.simplypsychology.org/pygmalion-effect.html
5. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1066376.pdf
6. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-resilient-children/202505/understanding-the-pygmalion-effect
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
8. https://www.simplypsychology.org/labelling-theory-education.html
9. https://classdifferenceineducation.weebly.com/labelling.html
10. https://www.hectic-teacher.co.uk/sociology-support/education/ed6-roles-and-processes
11. https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/sociology/education/theories-of-education
12. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-introductiontosociology/chapter/symbolic-interactionist-theory-on-education/
13. https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/soci101/chapter/16-2-sociological-perspectives-on-education/
14. https://fiveable.me/sociology-of-education/unit-1/symbolic-interactionism/study-guide/LG8plq1OjRRRtRFn
15. https://www.earlyyears.tv/symbolic-interactionism-theory/