Positioning and Counter-Positioning in an Istitutional Setting. the Role of Children's Active Participation in Managing Conflicts

This paper presents some videorecorded episodes of conflicts involving children and adults at school. These cases describe the multidimensionality of school community work and point to: 1) the distinctiveness of the interactional construction of the conflicts in schools; 2) the ways institutionalized organizational narratives become cultural resources for framing, scripting, and revising problems as plots; and 3) the interdependence of micro- and macro processes. The approach construes conflicts as a dynamic part of classroom social life in which personal expressions are affected by and affect teachers' and students' classroom norms of conduct. Conflicts are observed in discursive practices that interactively construct social positions and diverging/shared narratives. Drawing from work on organizational narratives, positioning theory, and conflict analysis, this presentation focuses in particular on the role of children's active participation in managing conflicts in an istitutional setting.