while there has been a good deal written about higher education in general, there has been comparatively little research specifically on the college classroom. Rarely have research attempted to consider the processes through which students and teachers formulate definitions of the classroom as a social setting. The problem of how students and teachers assign "meaning" to the classroom situation has been largely neglected. Although writing about primary and secondary school classrooms, we would suggest that the following statement from Jackson's(1968) "life in classrooms" hold true or college as well.