Toward a theory of a personal metacompetence for children's conduct of their everyday life

Abstract

This article calls for the theorizing of human development whereby children are understood as subjects who develop and make use of their personal action competences as participants in social practices, rather than as persons with fixed personal properties and mental structures. The combination of the directedness in children's participation in social practices, on the one hand, and the complexity and diversity of today's social practices, on the other, imposes particular demands on children as they try to conduct their everyday life in line with important personal concerns and goals. The article addresses two general questions: How can we understand the prerequisites that make the child able to “lead” his complex everyday life? How are these prerequisites developed, maintained, and reconstructed in and across the social practices that constitute the child's everyday life? This article discusses the theoretical conceptualizations of “ability” and “competence” as competing candidates for the key concept for understanding the prerequisites for the child's ability to lead his everyday life. The weaknesses in the individualistic and situated approaches to learning are examined with an aspiration to transcend the two positions with the formulation of a new, “third alternative.” Although this article criticizes some important aspects of Critical psychology and Situated learning theory, it is nevertheless also inspired by these two approaches to human learning. This article presents a theory of the development of personal action competences and a contribution to a theoretical framework for understanding and researching children's personal conduct of their everyday life. On this basis, this article proposes the concept of personal metacompetence for the conduct of the everyday life as a theoretical point of departure for future research.