Introduction to the Special Issue

This introductory paper to the special issue of Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica. Journal of Theories and Re-search in Education illustrates the overall design of the projectChICaS (Children’s Interactional Competence at School: Conversational Social Norms, Forms of Participation, and Language Structures) and revises the first results of the research presented in the articles here included. The project was coordinated by Piera Margutti and carried out by four research units across Italy (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, University of Bologna, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, University Roma Tre) over more than two years (October 2023-February 2026). The object of the project was the pragmatic and interactional abilities of primary school children, which were studied by analysingbauthentic video-recorded data. By establishing the children’s visible conducts in the class as the analytical focus of the research, the project, and this special issue, pay close attention to the often overlooked and neglected party in the classroom, offering a more complex picture of classroom interaction than portrayed in prior research. In fact, the perspective we adopted here looks at the classroom from the point of view of pupils: what they do, their agency, their inferences, the rules with which they display compliance, the initiatives they take and the actions they perform beyond responding to the teacher’s initiatives and solicitations, discovering new dimensions and interactional dynamics. The initial section introduces the overall purpose and methodologies of the project, while the following section reviews the contributions, highlighting the main themes across the articles.