At the core of education as institutionalized pedagogical practices is classroom interaction. Here we find sites for teaching and learning activities, the making of lived curricula as well displays of social and cultural asymmetries. Given this it is not surprising that a set of research paradigms and research controversies are presented in education research – as presented by e.g. Bellack (1978), Mehan (1979), Macbeth (2003), Gee (2004), or Lindblad & Sahlström (2002). In this paper we go into studies of classroom interaction with a micro-ethnographic stance using video- and audio recordings of teaching processes in different contexts spanning over a period of forty years. We are using this time span in order to discuss ways of describing and analysing pedagogical processes, where notions of context is vital. Our point of departure is based on curriculum theorizing using a Bernstein (e.g. 2000) approach based on relations between curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. Given this, we put the pedagogical practices into social contexts (such as framing and classification). This does not mean that classroom practices are instantiations of “a higher order” but rather that these practices are matters of institutional work permeated by social facts. Here, we are eclectic: we use the seminal work of Mehan (1979) to describe classroom interaction with a basis in IRE-sequences (Initiation-Reply-Evaluation) as characteristic in the language of schooling. With this as a basis we describe and compare classroom interaction in different contexts. This is regarded as a way to describe aspects of pedagogy in a Bernsteinian meaning and to analyze change in classroom interaction.