Children’s invoking of school rules in directive sequences with adults at home and school: mobilizing the teacher and school artefacts as authoritative sources

1 Introduction

Previous research has extensively illustrated that social interaction is a key site for the (re)constitution and negotiation of interactants’ relative positions of authority, and, therefore, for children’s socialization into social asymmetries (Howard 2012; Schegloff 2006). Through mundane conversations with the more competent members of their community, children are introduced to hierarchical social relationships and authority asymmetries (Burdelski 2013; Clancy 1986; Ochs 1988), gradually developing the ability to discern existing asymmetries and take an active part in their local (re)constitution or negotiation in interaction. Social asymmetries particularly characterize children’s interactions with their adult caregivers in the two main contexts of socialization, the family and the school, where children are steadily confronted with adults who enjoy a socially and/or institutionally sanctioned position of authority in comparison to them. These ‘powerful’ adults variously attempt to shape children’s behavior through “practices of control” (Goodwin and Cekaite 2018) and especially directives, i.e., turns designed to get someone to do something (Craven and Potter 2010; Goodwin and Cekaite 2013). Faced with adults’ directives that impinge to various degrees on their autonomy, children may deploy specific practices to counter the directives and negotiate the necessary courses of action, relying on a variety of verbal, embodied, and material resources.

Despite their relevance to the local construction of social asymmetries, children’s practices to negotiate and achieve a position of authority in interactions with adults have been little investigated, with most studies focusing on peer interaction (e.g., Davidson 2022; Griswold 2007). Even though parent-child interaction and particularly directive sequences have received considerable analytic attention, these have been rarely conceptualized specifically as a site for the local negotiation of authority (but see Frick and Palola 2022; Kent 2012a, 2012b; Killmer 2023).

The present article contributes to this underexplored line of inquiry by addressing the following research questions: How do children challenge and re-negotiate authority asymmetries with their adult caregivers in directive sequences? How do children mobilize locally available resources to negotiate their positions of authority vis-à-vis their adult caregivers?

Based on 70 h of video-recorded interactions between adults and children aged 6–10 years old, this cross-contextual study adopts a conversation analytic approach to analyze a practice that children deploy in response to adults’ directives both in the classroom and during homework completion at home. Instead of complying with the adults’ directives, children invoke school rules (which are here broadly meant as obligations, habits, and expectations regarding appropriate ways of conduct at school; Martin and Evaldsson 2012) that contradict the directive. As the analysis will show, this practice is instrumental to the interactional negotiation of children’s and adults’ respective positions of authority regarding a local matter of concern.

The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we review previous studies on the constitution and management of authority in social interaction, with a particular focus on interactions involving children with their caregivers and in peer groups. After describing the data and methodology of the study (Section 3), we analyze a series of examples from the school and the family context to illustrate how children invoke school rules by mobilizing either the teacher’s claims and conduct or the school textual artefacts available in the specific environment (Section 4). In conclusion (Section 5), we discuss the relevance of children’s invocation of school rules to the interactional negotiation of social asymmetries and outline the limitations of the study, together with possible venues of future research.

2 Literature review

3 Data and methodology

The analysis is based on two corpora of video-recordings collected in Northern Italy between 2018 and 2020, with participants being recruited through the authors’ personal and work connections. The first corpus consists of 30 h of video-recorded interactions in two primary schools. The data were collected during a nine-months ethnography and through various video- and audio- recording devices, which allowed the researcher to document both teachers’ and children’s peer practices (see Nasi 2022a, 2022b). The second corpus was collected in 19 family residences and consists of 40 h of video-recorded homework sessions involving primary school children and their parents. The family data is part of a larger project aimed at investigating children’s socialization during ordinary family activities (e.g., homework, mealtime, see Caronia and Colla 2021; Caronia et al. 2021; Colla 2023). To minimize the potential impact of the research setting in the private home space, the video-recording process was self-administered by the parents in compliance with the researcher’s guidelines. For both corpora, participants’ consent was obtained according to the Italian and European laws regulating the handling of personal and sensitive data.

Beyond their differences, the two corpora have significant similarities that make them comparable as for the interactive practices deployed by the participants, particularly the children. Indeed, both corpora include primary school children aged between 6 and 10 years old interacting with their adult caregivers, either parents or schoolteachers. Furthermore, both corpora are strictly linked to the school setting. While the first corpus was collected in schools, the second one focuses on an activity that – despite taking place in the home – is by definition ‘school-related’: homework. Indeed, as the examples below will show, homework is an everyday parent-child activity whereby the school moral system enters the family context daily (Colla 2023).

The data-collection and analytic methods adopted were also common, as both corpora were collected through research combining a video-ethnographic approach with Conversation Analysis. Indeed, the micro-analytical instruments of Conversation Analysis are particularly suited to highlighting the semiotic resources whereby participants index authority (Nasi 2022a). As regards ethnographic information, background knowledge of the contexts was key to understanding the relevance of the authoritative sources that the children mobilized in their interactions with the adults (Maynard 2006). Among the differences between the home and classroom settings, a crucial one concerns the participation frameworks: while the family homework interaction is largely dyadic (parent-child), classroom interaction is inherently multiparty. This, as we will show, influences the children’s participation in directive sequences.

4 Analysis

The analysis proceeded inductively. After repeated observations of the data, we noticed that in both corpora the children happened to invoke school rules in response to adults’ directives. Specifically, instead of producing the preferred response to the directive (i.e., compliance, Kent 2012a), the children invoked a school rule contradicting the adult’s directive. They did that in two different ways: (a) by reporting the teacher’s claims or conduct, and/or (b) by making relevant a school textual artefact in the environment. We also identified the multimodal resources used by the children in invoking school rules. When reporting teachers’ claims or conduct, the children relied on reported speech (Holt 1996; Holt and Clift 2006) or brief narratives; when making relevant school textual artefacts, the children used verbal deictics and/or occurrences of “environmentally coupled gestures” (Goodwin 2007: 55).

We identified 10 occurrences of these sequences: 4 in the school corpus and 6 in the family corpus. Despite their relatively small number, these sequences are worth exploring as they constitute a key – yet underexplored (see Section 2.3) – locus for the interactional negotiation of authority and local power asymmetries between adults and children. Indeed, as the analysis will show, by mobilizing the teacher’s claim or conduct and/or a school artefact, the children index their primary epistemic access to a specific school rule, thereby claiming rights to decide on the issue. These epistemic displays accomplished through the mobilization of authoritative sources like the teacher and school texts appear to be effective in variously modifying the adult’s “directive trajectory” (Goodwin 2006a): they make relevant for the teachers and the parents to change the addressee or content of the directive, to mitigate its directiveness, and/or to finally abandon the directive sequence.

The identified sequences have been fully transcribed according to Conversation Analysis conventions (Jefferson 2004) enriched with notations for gaze directions, gestures, and body movements when ostensibly relevant for the participants. The transcripts are presented in two lines: the original Italian transcript is followed by an idiomatic translation in American English. For the sake of anonymity, all names have been fictionalized. The transcripts feature two different kinds of arrows pointing respectively to the adult’s directive (⇒) and the child’s response invoking school rules (→).

The excerpts presented in the following sections constitute emblematic examples that illustrate the ways in which the children in our data invoked school rules in response to the adults’ directives both in the classroom and during homework at home. As the analysis will show, through this practice, the children challenge local authority asymmetries by indexing their primary epistemic access to the invoked rule and thereby claiming superior deontic rights compared to the adult on the specific issue.

4.2 Invoking rules by mobilizing school textual artefacts

The next excerpts illustrate another way in which the children in our data invoked school rules in response to the adults’ directive, i.e., by making relevant a school textual artefact in the environment, such as a school notebook or a classroom poster. This is mainly done through verbal deictics and/or occurrences of “environmentally coupled gestures” (Goodwin 2007: 55). Excerpt 3 below was recorded in the same classroom as Excerpt 2 and features again a multiparty interaction, involving the same assistant teacher and several pupils. The children have been painting on some posters and are now expected to tidy up and clean the paintbrushes. After the assistant teacher issues a directive prompting four children (Melek, Ana, Salam, and Dario) to clean the paintbrushes, a child (Elke) points to a poster indicating pupils’ chores (see Figure 3), which is thus constructed as the authoritative source on the matter.

Figure 1:

The assistant teacher issues a directive telling Laura to finish her task.

Figure 2:

Maruk responds to the assistant teacher’s directive by reporting the main teacher’s claims through reported speech.

Figure 3:

“Who does what … ”. The poster displays pupils’ appointed chores in the classroom. Different groups of children are responsible for (a) materials (subdivided into quaderni, “notebooks” and matite, “pencils”), (b) food and beverages (termed as camerieri, “waiters”), (c) tidying up (termed as ordinatori, “cleaners”), and (d) dealing with the schedule (termed as segretari, “secretaries”).

Excerpt 3:

“No ((points to the poster indicating pupils’ chores))”

Assistant teacher; Ana; Elke; Selena; Jane (all children 8 years old, third grade)
	1 2	Ass. Teacher	chi sono: (0.2) who are: (0.2) i pennelli chi li lava? who cleans the brushes? [Figure 4]
	3	Ana	gli    ordini the ones tidying up
	4	Ass. Teacher	[h? ((face expression indexing troubles in understanding))
	5	Elke	[i mate [rialisti [the ma  [terialists
	6	Ana	[ordini        [tidying up
	7	Ass. Teacher	[ah sì        [oh yes ((goes to the poster indicating pupils’ chores))
	8	Selena	i materiale the materials
	9		(3.0)
⇒ ⇒	10 11	Ass. Teacher	allora (.) Melek Ana Salam so (.) Melek Ana Salam e Dario lavano i pennelli and Dario clean the brushes
	12	Jane	n[o::,
→	13	Elke	[no: ((points to the poster indicating pupils’ chores)) [Figure 5]
	14	Ass. Teacher	no questa è ordine scusa. no this is tidying up sorry.
	15	Elke	materiali materials
	16 17 18	Ass. Teacher	materiale, (0.5) sia quaderni che ma- no material, (0.5) both notebooks and pe- no materiali e matite sono Yassin e Carlo, materials and pencils are Yassin and Carlo, (0.7) Jane e Mehrawi i pennelli. (0.7) Jane and Mehrawi the brushes.

In lines 1 and 2, the assistant teacher stands up in front of the class (Figure 4) asking the children who is responsible for cleaning the paintbrushes. Some children answer, referring to the categories into which the children are divided according to their different chores (see Figure 3): Ana states that the children who tidy up are responsible, whereas Elke and Selena suggest that the materialists are in charge of cleaning the paintbrushes (lines 3, 5, 6, 8). In response to this, the assistant teacher walks toward the poster that displays children’s duties, possibly to check who is assigned to which duty. Thereby, the teacher displays her orientation to the “who does what” poster as an authoritative source in deciding which children are to clean the brushes.

The assistant teacher now stands in front of the poster and consults it (outside the camera frame). Having found the children supposedly in charge of the cleaning task, she announces their names to the class and issues a directive telling them to go and clean the brushes (so Melek, Ana, Salam, and Dario clean the brushes, lines 10 and 11). In this case too, the adult’s directive is followed by the children’s non-compliance. Indeed, Jane and Elke verbally reject the directive (no, lines 12 and 13). Concurrently, Elke makes relevant the school rules inscribed in and displayed by a school textual artefact: by pointing to the “who does what” poster through an environmentally coupled gesture, Elke makes relevant the information it contains, which contradicts the assistant teacher’s directive, particularly as concerns the addressed pupils. By multimodally invoking school rules, Elke challenges the directive and presents herself as more knowledgeable than the assistant teacher on the specific rule that is to be applied, i.e., the rule concerning the selection of children for chores.

In the following turn, the assistant teacher repairs her previous turn (Jefferson et al. 1977): she acknowledges her own mistake, apologizes (line 14), and finally announces to the class the names of other children, framing them as the correct addressees of her previous directive (line 18). Similarly to Excerpts 1–2, the child’s invoking of school rules has an impact on the unfolding of the directive sequence: vis-à-vis the child’s mobilizing of the school textual artefact, the assistant teacher modifies her directive trajectory, demonstrating her orientation to taking into account the child’s displayed knowledge on the specific issue at hand, i.e., who must clean the brushes. Yet, unlike Excerts 1–2, in this case the modification of the adult’s directive trajectory concerns the addressees of the directive: the assistant teacher does not abandon the directive sequence but rather re-issues the directive by addressing other children.

In the final excerpt (4), which is drawn from the family homework corpus, the child deploys the practice of invoking school rules by both reporting the teacher’s claims and making relevant a school textual artefact. We join the exchange when nine-year-old Tania and her mother are doing a math problem. After completing a calculation, Tania proposes to write down the result, but the mother disagrees with her. In response to the mother’s directive, Tania reports the teacher’s speech and indicates the math notebook showing the exercises done at school.

Figure 4:

The assistant teacher asks the class who is responsible for cleaning the brushes.

Figure 5:

Elke points to the poster indicating pupils’ chores.

Excerpt 4:

“Look here ((shows a page in the math notebook))”

Mother; Tania (nine years old, fourth grade)
	1	Tania	>allora scrivo<= >then I’ll write<=
⇒	2	Mother	=però no.     [aspetta.] =but no.          [wait.  ]
	3	Tania	[consumati] in,             [consumed ] in,
⇒	4	Mother	non  importa che lo scrivi perché la   [domanda  ]= you don’t need to write it because the     [question]=
	5	Tania	[sì:::::]
			[ye::::s]
	6	Mother	=↑non ti chiede quello. =↑doesn’t ask you that.
	7		ti chiede gli etto:litri it asks about the hecto:liters
→	8	Tania	eh ma a m:e, la maestra mi dice sempre eh but to m:e, the teacher always says
	9		di   ˆfar così (.) guarda to ˆdo it like this (.) look
	10		ˆ((starts leafing through the math notebook))
	11	10 seconds omitted: Tania leafs through the math notebook looking for a problem done at school.
→	12	Tania	guarda (0.8) qui::, look (0.8) he::re, ((showing a math notebook page to the mother))
	13	Mother	[eh] ((looking at the page))
	14	Tania	[qu]esto proble:ma, noi gli scriviamo [th]is problem, we write on it
	15		cos’è que:sto, cos’è que:st, what thi:s is, what thi:s is ((pointing to a line on the page))
	16	Mother	va bene. allora scrivi ok. then write

In line 2, the mother issues a directive telling Tania not to write down the partial result of the calculation (but no. wait., line 2). However, Tania continues her interactive trajectory by proposing the text to be written (consumed in, line 3). Vis-à-vis the child’s non-compliance, the mother issues a further, declarative directive (you don’t need to write it, line 4) and accounts for the directives by explaining why there is no need to write down the result (lines 4 and 6–7). Through the account, the mother pursues her directive trajectory, urging the child to comply. Yet, instead of complying, Tania repeatedly invokes school rules. Right after the mother’s directive, Tania reports the teacher’s words through an instance of indirect reported speech (eh but to me, the teacher always says to do it like this, lines 8–9). It is also worth noting that Tania reinforces her claim by presenting the teacher’s statement as recurrent (always) and addressed to her specifically (to me). Similarly to Excerpt 2, reported speech allows the child to make relevant her first-hand knowledge of the teacher’s claims, which the mother cannot have access to and therefore cannot contest. Through this instance of reported speech, Tania constructs herself as more knowledgeable than her mother on the issue. Furthermore, she presents the mother’s directive as inconsistent with school rules, thus legitimizing her non-compliance.

Immediately after this, Tania makes relevant a locally available and inspectable school artefact: the math notebook. By drawing the mother’s attention (look, line 9) and leafing through the math notebook (line 10), the child projects the display of evidence for her report. After 10 seconds of research (line 11), Tania finally finds a problem done at school and shows it to her mother (line 12). Through the verbal deictic (here) and the environmentally coupled gesture, the child makes relevant the math notebook and its inscriptions as visible demonstrations of the school rules that she has been verbalizing (see lines 8–9 and 14–15). By referring to the class group as we, Tania conveys her membership to the classroom community, thus further emphasizing her own first-hand knowledge and authority deriving from direct experience of school life. Similarly to the previous examples, the invoking of teacher’s speech and school textual artefacts allows the child to present the adult’s directive as inconsistent with the school moral system. Vis-à-vis the child’s invoking of school rules that contradict her directive, the mother finally accepts the child’s non-compliance (va bene, line 16) and issues a further directive prompting Tania to do what she initially argued for, i.e., writing down the partial result (allora scrivi , line 16). Therefore, in this excerpt too, the child’s invoking of school rules impacts on the directive sequence, prompting the mother to modify the object of her directive: the mother now urges the child to write the partial result (line 16), rather than not to write it (lines 2 and 4).

5 Discussion and conclusions

Focusing on adult-child interactions both in the classroom and during homework completion at home, the analysis has illustrated a practice that children aged 6–10 years old may deploy in response to teachers’ and parents’ directives: invoking school rules that contradict the directive. In our data, the children invoked school rules in two different ways: (a) through the report of the teacher’s claims (Excerpts 2 and 4) or conduct (Excerpt 1), and/or (b) through reference to a school textual artefact available in the environment (Excerpts 3 and 4). In both cases, the school rules contradicting the directive are made available to the adult who issued the directive: by resorting to reported speech (Excerpts 2 and 3) and narratives (Excerpt 1), the children craft their own claims as accurate and reliable renditions of the teacher’s speech and conduct; through the use of environmentally coupled gestures (Excerpts 3 and 4), the children make the school rule inscribed in textual artefacts visible and inspectable to the adult. As the analysis has shown, the children’s invoking of school rules has a relevant impact on the unfolding of the directive sequence: after this practice, the parents and the teachers variously modify their directive trajectory, for example by mitigating their subsequent directives and finally abandoning the directive sequence (Excerpts 1 and 2), or by modifying the directive addressee (Excerpt 3) or its content (Excerpt 4). From this point of view, the discursive mobilization of school rules that contradict the adults’ directives appears to make a difference in the local distribution of authority, allowing the children to interactionally establish their right to counter and negotiate the adults’ directive.

Indeed, through this practice, the children challenge the legitimacy of the directive, constructing it as inconsistent with the invoked institutional rule of the school. By responding to the directives with school rules, the children claim their primary epistemic access to the specific rule, a kind of knowledge which is precluded to their adult interlocutor. In this way, the children manage to present themselves rather than the adult as the ones knowing best and therefore having the right to decide on the issue. That is, the children lay epistemic claims based on their primary epistemic access, which are in turn instrumental to upholding their deontic stance. In this way, the children aptly strengthen their claims regarding necessary lines of action, challenging the asymmetrical authority relationship projected by the adults’ directives, and temporarily re-distributing adult-child asymmetries in relation to the deontic authority.

Importantly, the efficacy of this practice relies on the authority that both the children and the adults confer on school rules, and more specifically to the teachers and the school artefacts invoked. The adults’ acknowledgement of the authority of school rules appears evident not only from the way they modify their directive trajectories according to the invoked school rules, but also from their conduct in issuing directives. For example, Gaia’s mother is clearly oriented to a school-provided textual artefact like the photocopy when telling the child what to do (Excerpt 1). Similarly, the assistant teacher treats the “who does what” classroom poster as an authoritative source on which to base the decision on who must clean the brushes (Excerpt 3). Orienting to and multimodally invoking school rules to authorize claims in interaction therefore appears to be a practice used by the teachers and the parents as well (see Colla 2023), which suggests that the children may have been socialized into this practice by their adult caregivers.

The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of children’s strategies to counter adults’ directives and challenge power asymmetries. Integrating previous studies on children’s non-compliant responses to adults’ directives (Kent 2012a, 2012b), this article illustrates a practice that has been previously documented only in children’s peer interaction (Cobb-Moore et al. 2009; Nasi 2022b). Moreover, the study adds to these previous studies by showing how children’s invoking of rules is bound to a local mobilization of the authoritative source in which the rule originates or is inscribed, i.e., the teacher and/or the school textual artefact. In our study, the children do not simply state school rules, rather they invoke them by reporting the teacher’s claims or conduct, and/or by mobilizing a school textual artefact available in the environment, like a school book or a classroom poster. Notably, the study also illustrates that this practice is cross-contextual, emerging both in the school context and at home during homework. In both contexts the practice of invoking school rules, particularly the teacher’s speech or conduct, is made possible by the presence of more than one adult figure in the social constellation that might be made relevant in that specific occasion: in the classroom, children might draw from various teachers (the main teachers, the assistant teachers), whereas at home the task of homework completion is bound to the adult figures who are more or less directly involved in the activity (the teacher who assigned the exercises and the parent who assists the child during their completion). In this regard, the children seem aware of the fact that the figures whose voice or conduct is reported must be perceived as more authoritative than their current interlocutor issuing the directive. In the classroom, this amounts to presentifying the main teacher in front of the assistant teacher (Excerpt 2), while during homework the children evoked the teacher’s voice and conduct in front of the parent (Excerpts 1 and 4). Apart from this similarity, a difference between the two contexts concerns the local participation framework (Goffman 1981). At school, the teacher often issues directives in front of several children, who might intervene even though they are not the ratified addressee of the directives (see Excerpt 2). Thus, two or more children might form local ‘alliances’ to counter the adult’s directives (Excerpts 2 and 3). In the context of homework completion at home, these kinds of shifts in the participation framework are rarer as the homework activity is typically one-on-one, involving one parent and one child at a time.

The main contribution of this study consists in shedding light on how children invoke school rules vis-à-vis adults’ directives, and showing how this practice impacts the unfolding of the directive sequence in the classroom and during homework completion at home. Clearly enough, the sequences analyzed in the study are not representative of all possible adult-child interactions that may develop in the contexts of family and school. For instance, there can be one-on-one interactions in the classroom, even though they are rather seldom without overhearing children. At home, parental directives might also be targeted at two or more children at the same time, for example in the case of siblings. More broadly, the study findings are based on a few sequences in a relatively small corpus, which cannot be generalized beyond the specific classes, families, and specific activities under scrutiny. Therefore, further research on adult-child interaction is needed to investigate if and how children deploy the practice of invoking school rules in different contexts other than classroom and family homework as well as in other interactive environments apart from directive sequences. These future studies could offer a more nuanced understanding of the set of practices whereby children challenge authority asymmetries, potentially adopting a longitudinal approach to account for children’s developing ability to use this and similar practices to support their epistemic and deontic claims.