Beyond alignment: understanding, resistance, and participation in classroom interaction

Abstract Classroom interactions are routinely organised around ideals of dialogue, participation, and inclusion. Interactional research, however, has shown that such ideals are not simply implemented in practice but are transformed through sequential organisation, role-based expectations, and institutional accountability. This article examines how rhetorical practices operate within classroom interaction by analysing video-recorded encounters in Italian primary school classrooms, where activities were organised around interactional orientations toward dialogic conflict management. The analysis focuses on educators’ use of interrogative-negative questions, repair-initiated interruptions, speaker selection, and post-confirmation-confirmation sequences. These practices are shown to rely on, and reproduce a grammar of education: a stabilised configuration of role-based epistemic asymmetry that authorises educators to manage interactional trajectories. The analysis further demonstrates that children are not passive recipients of pedagogical authority. Through silence, minimal responses, and counter-rhetoric, they display reflexive understanding of rhetorical interventions while withholding alignment with their projected outcomes. These responses make analytically visible the distinction between understanding and compliance and reveal resistance as an orderly, interactionally intelligible outcome of institutional communication. The article contributes to debates on institutional interaction by showing how authority depends on participants’ understanding without guaranteeing alignment and by conceptualising resistance not as individual opposition but as a reflexive response to the social forms organising interaction.