Roles are made or constructed by people with respect to particular types of situations. In the classroom, for example, teachers work or struggle to establish themselves in the role of teacher. They also struggle to get people to take on the role of student, learner, or class member. Professional informal educators often face particular problems in this respect. They are not able to draw upon a strong public understanding of their work.
People are less sure about what behaviour to expect.
However, they also have to work within very different and often fluid settings. Education is frequently absent from their titles although there may well be some expectation that they will attend to people s learning. However, this needs to be placed alongside the other expectations arising from their role e.g. organizing hostel life in the case of the first. As a result informal educators have to pay a lot of attention to the way that people see them, and to establishing themselves as educators. Playing a part The writer who raised the study of such interactions to almost an art form is Erving Goffman.