Children's Agency Research Articles

Play–literacy interface in childhood education: Across the scales of time and space

Play has been widely examined and viewed as an effective pedagogy to promote children's literacy development. While current research has identified various benefits associated with play, discrepancies still exist regarding what type of play could be more effective, for example, home play or school play. This could further lead to an outcome-oriented, positivist perception of play as a designed intervention that risks neglecting children's agency in creating, negotiating, and interpreting their play activities. In this conceptual article, we explore the theoretical affordance of the concept of temporal and spatial scales to rethink children's play as a dynamic, multilayered flow of meaning-making and negotiation across time and space. We discuss how using the lens of scales, play can be analyzed as actions, processes, and contexts. The methodological and pedagogical implications of scales are also illustrated for practical applications in research and education on play-based literacy learning. Finally, this article aims to draw researchers and educators’ attention to the complexity and diversity of play, as well as children's agency in (re)constructing playfulness.

Stimulating children's agency and positioning as subjects through aesthetic experiences in early years classrooms

This qualitative case study investigates how a series of aesthetic interventions on philosophically complex themes, such as death and fear as life experiences, offered to first graders at a multicultural urban school in Norway, stimulate their agency and positioning as subjects. Drawing on video-recorded observations and artefacts produced by the children during the project, we show that their responses were enacted in multiple ways. This included nonverbal mirroring of the adults’ actions with and without further interactional extensions but also responses beyond mirroring where the children drew on multiple semiotic resources such as dialogue, writing, drawn images, and the body, to share their experiences with others. We argue that the interventions can be seen as platforms for both individual and communal enactments of the children's agency through joint, multimodal explorations of complex concepts and what it means for the children to be subject in the world.

Re-Imagining Childhood Grief: Children as Active Agents in a Transactional Process.

Bereavement during childhood impacts children's wellbeing and biopsychosocial development. Research examining impacts and outcomes of childhood bereavement and supportive interventions has highlighted a myriad of factors that influence children's unique, complex experiences of grief, necessitating a personalized, child-centred approach. Children's grief support is underpinned by well-established grief theories studied primarily in adult populations, and stage-based developmental theories that characterise child development as "normative" and universal. We propose a rethinking that recognises: development in childhood as transactional, dynamic, and bidirectional; children as active agents; and social contexts influencing grief and development. This conceptualisation invites expanded understandings of: children's grief in response to death and non-death losses; contextual, relational influences on children's experiences of grief; ways that grieving children's rights and agency are supported and thwarted in their daily lives; and opportunities for professionals, family and community members to support grieving children with compassionate curiosity and cultural humility to nurture grief-literate communities.

Child agency in early language development and learning: introduction to special issue

ABSTRACT This introductory paper seeks to demonstrate how the articles in this volume enhance our understanding of child agency in both language development at home and language learning in educational environments. The four contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of child agency in early childhood. The volume aims to strengthen this emerging field by bringing together areas such as agency, family language policy, educational language policy in preschool settings, and methodologies for researching with and about children in early language learning contexts. The introduction focuses on five themes relevant to our discussion of what is novel in this special issue: (1) child agency, (2) issues in research in early language learning, (3) the symbiotic relationship between child agency and family language policy, (4) the role of educational context in child agency development, and (5) the ecological approach toward child agency.

Representations of schooling and childhood during the COVID‐19 pandemic in England

AbstractDuring the COVID‐19 pandemic, questions abounded about how best to support children during the ‘new normal’ where homes, often instead of schools, were identified as the usual sites of learning. Educational research has explored the impact of COVID‐19 on schools, education and learning, and childhood studies research has shown the impact on children's rights and paid attention to how constructs of childhood have shaped government responses. In this paper, we bring these fields together through exploring constructions of childhood alongside those of schooling. We systematically analyse the representations of schooling and childhood in 72 BBC news articles published on 1 June—the day that primary schools started to reopen in England. Our findings show that the dominant ‘frames’ of reporting centred around risk and fear. COVID‐19 risks exist to health and safety, to children's education and to childhood more generally. The news media portrayed schooling as synonymous with learning, children as passive and childhood as a time of both happiness and ‘loss’. We argue that these normative discourses exploit children as symbols of hope, conceal alternative ways of thinking about learning and are restrictive and unreflective of children's agency and real‐life experiences. In the aftermath of the pandemic, academics and policymakers need to continue to debate and explore the nature of learning and children's perspectives on school in order to critically examine the current system of schooling.

The Voices of Minor Children of Parents With a Mental Illness or Addiction: A Qualitative Evidence Synthesis

ABSTRACTThis qualitative evidence synthesis aims to show how the agency and voices of minor children of parents with a mental illness (COPMI) or with an addiction (COPA) are represented in existing qualitative research. A thematic analysis was conducted to analyse the parts of the articles reporting on the voices of COPMI/COPA themselves (e.g., through interviews with them). Special attention was given to how the authors of the different articles represented children's agency and amplified their voices. The four themes found were secrecy and privacy, lack of information, fear and worry and informal care. Thus, these are the topics most commonly discussed by COPMI and COPA themselves. They both spoke of themselves as victims and as agents, and these two were strongly intertwined in their descriptions of their experiences and situations. The most important recommendation for policy, practice and research based on these results is that it is important to listen to what minor COPMI/COPA have to say about their own situation and see them not only as a victim of this situation but also as an agent.

"I'm always fighting the Coronavirus because it's dangerous to my family": Children's agency, resilience, and role in the family during COVID-19 in Israel.

This study explores the experiences of Israeli children (N = 50) aged 3-6 years from middle to high socioeconomic status on the COVID-19 pandemic from their own perspectives. Following a qualitative-phenomenological paradigm and utilizing a semistructured interview format designed to involve children through a card game, this research seeks to unearth the nuanced dynamics of parent-child communication against the backdrop of Israel's distinctive sociopolitical context, characterized by "deep securitization" and some of the strictest COVID-19 restrictions enforced globally. Based on the interviews conducted with children, four main themes emerged: (1) how children were exposed to information; (2) types of information children were exposed to; (3) active mediation versus restrictive mediation; and (4) militant discourse and desire to fight. Incorporating multisystem theory (Masten & Narayan, 2012) to explore the interplay of risk and protective factors, the study situates these within Israel's unique sociopolitical context which engendered expressions of resilience and agency among young children. By highlighting the interrelationships between national security measures and family life, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex factors that affected young children's experiences during the pandemic, highlighting the workings of the transformation of adversity into resilience within contextually specific settings during times of crises. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's perspectives of learning through play in the majority world: Findings from Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda

AbstractAs efforts to use learning through play (LtP) expand globally, it is important to explore how children's perspectives impact the efficacy and experience of this pedagogical approach. LtP has been conceptualized as a spectrum from free play to guided play to teacher‐directed play. This spectrum describes different ways in which play happens—with varying levels of adult support—and acknowledges that children's agency is characterized by choice and the ability to direct, participate in, and/or initiate play. Previous research has primarily focused on adult perceptions of LtP for preschool children in high‐resource contexts. We present the perspectives on LtP of children (3–12 years) in Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda. We photographed learning activities in community centres and schools that incorporated play‐based practices. In group discussions, we used these photographs to elicit children's perspectives on the difference between play and learning in the classroom, the factors that influence their construction of play and learning, and the role that teachers play in these activities. Conceptualizations across the three research sites and ages were similar: Children associated learning with play if the activity was fun and social; distinctions between play and learning were defined by content, modality, materials and location; and teachers were seen as involved in play under limited conditions. We discuss the implications of our findings for the implementation of LtP in majority‐world contexts. By moving teachers from a primarily teacher‐directed approach to more guided‐play approaches, we are not only asking teachers to give up some control but are also asking children to think about adults in fundamentally different ways. This research highlights that we may need to couple professional development for teachers with approaches that support children to change their perceptions of agency and choice in the classroom.

Interactional space for agency: Discussing photography with preschoolers

According to the latest research in both arts education and childhood studies, young children's agency is relational, entangled and negotiated. However, in early childhood visual arts education, modernist practices emphasising the independent and self-expressive child–agent are still recognisable. In this article, early childhood artistic activities are seen as a shared venue for interaction, social exchange and joint meaning-making, thereby providing a specific forum for displaying agency. Informed by conversation analysis, we explore discussions between 14 preschoolers and a researcher on contemporary art and children's self-authored photographs in a workshop in an early childhood education and care centre. By examining our discussions as turn-by-turn procedures, we identify children's displays of agency. The findings illustrate children's agency as a multifaceted and complex interactional phenomenon based on verbal and non-verbal communication and demonstrating both imaginative, progressively oriented talk and modes of resistance. While a shared playful stance appeared as a suitable means to approach art/creative photographs, it simultaneously became an essential interactional resource for inviting and promoting children's agency. Collaborative play with photographs provided an interactional space in which the fixed child/children–adult binary could be questioned and different types of agency were available for both children and the adult.

Sustainability, play and children´s agency: a comparative study of the Swedish and Turkish preschool curricula

ABSTRACT In this study, we compared how sustainability, children’s agency, and play are addressed in preschool curricula in Sweden and Turkey. Content analysis was used to analyse, interpret, and compare the content. The findings indicated that sustainability is explicitly integrated into the Swedish curriculum but only partly mentioned in the Turkish curriculum. Play is a core part of children’s learning in Sweden, whereas, in Turkey, play is mainly referred to as a method. The Swedish preschool curriculum emphasises democracy as a central aspect, which reflects the dedication to fostering children's agency and their comprehension of rights and participation. The Turkish curriculum, meanwhile – while acknowledging democratic principles, child rights, and participation – does not provide a comprehensive framework for promoting children’s agency. Our qualitative study contributes to knowledge about policies that may lead to practices concerning preschool education in Sweden and Turkey that focus on sustainability, children’s agency, and play.

Being family via WeChat: Children's interpretation of long‐distance family relationships

AbstractThis study explores how left‐behind children in rural China maintain long‐distance family relationships through WeChat, highlighting the significant role of social media during family separation. It underscores the importance of considering children's voices in understanding family relationships in the digital age. Drawing on online workshops and interviews with 41 participants, the research examines how Chinese left‐behind children use WeChat to facilitate parental engagement and manage their emotions. It also investigates the challenges children face in online communication and their perspectives on grandparental involvement. This article argues that children's agency is situated within structural conditions shaped by a confluence of factors, including technological affordances, unique familial contexts, and socio‐economic inequalities. This situatedness fosters creativity, compromises, and adaptations in ‘being family’ at a distance.

Assembling kindergarteners’ agency during classroom free play time

ABSTRACT Countless studies have documented that free play is an ideal space for children to exercise agency and become independent individuals. However, the narrative of free play within Canadian schools remains problematic. Drawing from relational lenses (Oswell, 2013), we adopted the construct of entanglement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to explore how children's agency manifested during kindergarten free play time. A qualitative research design utilizing action research methodology (Stringer, 2014) was used to invite kindergarten teachers and education stakeholders to participate in the study. Participants came together in eight focus groups where the teacher-researchers shared evidence about how play happened in their classrooms. Thematic analysis (Babbie, 2010) revealed that kindergarteners' agency was entangled in free play scenarios where children felt safe; further, daily encounters with free play time became a significant assembled piece for children's agency capacity to unfold. The study also indicated that teachers' perceptions, the allocation of time, and the design of classroom spaces permitted children to enact their expressions of agency. The study suggests that renegotiating the discourse of free play as a relational space for kindergarteners' agency capacity to be practiced could shift the ways free play is defined within Canadian kindergarten classrooms and school policies.

Make new friends, leave my friends: A dialogical investigation into transition experiences and agency in children from UK Armed Forces families

AbstractThis article provides new perspectives on the transitions of children from military families. It examines the experiences and agency of a group of UK primary‐school Service children who were undergoing far‐reaching transitions while participating in an arts‐based research project. Transitions are conceived here not as events, such as school moves, but as processes of changing, the dialogical interplay between ever‐changing socio‐cultural and physical environments and the psychological work individuals undertake in response to change. This reconceptualisation of transitions shifts attention away from children's resilience, or lack thereof, and towards unique, nuanced understandings of their subjective experiences and priorities. Presenting multimodal pieces created by three children as they explored the question, ‘What's it like to be a Service child in this school?’, I describe their diverse and agentic responses to their changing circumstances, as they sought to mitigate anticipated and past losses and perceived disadvantage and to use their transitions as positive opportunities for self‐development. Although punctuated by observable moments of change, this transition work happened over an indefinite timescale, highlighting a need for long‐term support informed by understandings of children's agency and priorities. Such support and insight may be achieved through developing spaces for multimodal dialogue with Service children.

Violence and Agency in Children’s Narratives

AbstractThe reconstruction of the agency of children who experience family violence is at the centre of this article. The focus is on the subjective experience of agency from the perspective of children, as well as their (in)ability to act and their (lack of) power to act. Based on semi-structured interviews, I analysed how children between the ages of 10 and 14 talk about their experiences of violence and how they present themselves as capable of acting in their narratives - despite their systematically vulnerable position. The analysis shows that establishing spatial distance, offering resistance, and hoping for help are central practices applied by the children. They also develop ‘prevention strategies’ to avoid renewed violence. Children also use the interview situation itself as a moment of empowerment by telling their story in a way that shows how they want to be perceived using their agency. At the same time, however, the limitation of their ability to act is also addressed, which is primarily attributed to their unfavourable position in the power hierarchy with adults. The limitation of their agency is particularly evident in the fact that children cannot stop or prevent violence in the long term despite their strategies. It is thus clearly recognisable that children remain in vulnerable positions despite their agency.

Children's agency within digital play and learning: Exploring the impact of shared play experiences on parent–child negotiations

Children's agency within digital play and learning: Exploring the impact of shared play experiences on parent–child negotiations

The Cultivation of Transnational Cultural Capital in Childhood: Experiences of Chinese Global Multiple Migrants

ABSTRACTThis study shows how class advantage is transferred to the next generation through parental strategies that cultivate their children's transnational cultural capital from an early age. It combines the concepts of cultural capital and concerted cultivation and adopts a novel methodology, examining parental aspirations (PAs) and strategies from the perspective of the children. The data are derived from the life stories of Chinese global multiple migrants. The article shows that the cultivation of transnational cultural capital amongst elite and middle‐class families in China is linked to traditional, neoliberal and non‐materialistic PAs. It reveals how parental capital is related to their aspirations and shapes their use of six cultivation strategies. It also discusses the contradictions, dilemmas and disagreements relating to concerted cultivation; examines children's agency and places the findings within global and national contexts. The results provide insights into culturally specific class mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of privilege in an era of globalization.

Breaking boundaries: children activist as epistemic agents within contours of epistemic marginalisation

The article delves into the realm of child environmental activism, portraying it as a concerted response aimed at challenging the prevailing social and political status quo, which systematically underestimates the role of children in decision-making within political and social spheres. It highlights the paramount importance of the epistemological framework that encompasses children's experiences, emphasising how their exclusion from political and social discourse leads to epistemic marginalisation. This exclusion not only prevents children from assuming the role of epistemic agents but also deprives them of agency and perpetuates existing inequalities. From a philosophical perspective, the article proposes a thorough analysis of children's epistemic agency, introducing the concept of 'epistemic capability'. It argues that, despite their social marginalisation, knowledgeable children can equip themselves with epistemic resources to interpret their reality and effect change. Furthermore, it posits that environmental activism plays a crucial role as an epistemic resource for children, facilitating the expression of their ideas, challenging dominant narratives, and addressing environmental and social issues head-on. The article emphasises the transformative potential of activism as an epistemic resource, enabling substantive participation and empowering children to navigate and transcend such marginalised circumstances. In conclusion, it highlights how child environmental activism not only challenges the status quo but also provides children with crucial tools for their development as epistemic and social agents, promoting significant change in power dynamics and in the fight for social and environmental justice.

Growing up in the ‘Ghetto’: children's ambiguous attachment in racialised communities in Denmark

ABSTRACT This article examines the community attachments of children living in stigmatised non-profit housing estates in Denmark. Drawing on childhood studies’ emphasis on children's agency, the analysis explores how children shape their place attachments within urban landscapes. Methods include ethnographic fieldwork in two neighbourhoods, walk-along interviews and photo-elicitation. The findings reveal how architectural, material, and symbolic aspects of a neighbourhood may afford children's pluri-ethnic social relations and attachment practices to a local community, based on acts of care in everyday interactions. While these practices are common, the analysis also explores how the territorial stigma racialises children's social spaces and catalyses differentiations, both internally and beyond their neighbourhood. Thus, the study deepens our understanding of children's ambiguous perceptions of and reactions to growing up in stigmatised communities.

«Распаковка» агентности в школьном проекте: перспективы участвующего подхода

School has become more project-oriented. There is tremendous potential for student agency here. Children's agency can be revealed through a participatory approach to childhood sociology. The analysis model is based on the principles of participatory methodology and interpretive reproduction by Corsaro. Three groups of variables are identified: the subjectivity of the child, the balance of power between the child and the adult, and the joint creativity of the participants. The empirical basis of the study is the “Green School” case, implemented online with the participation of five schoolchildren and one teacher from the Khabarovsk Territory. Observation, interviews, focus groups, and text analysis were used for the monographic analysis of the “case”. In a space of “equal participation”, where students and a teacher are co-participants and co-researchers, children’s agency can be disclosed. Children maximally expresses themselves through free choice, gaining personal experience in the process of making decisions. Responsibility arises not as an “obligation”, but as a motivation for learning: “how can we do it to make it better”. The results of this work can be used by educators in organizing project-based research activities for students, utilizing sociological methods adapted to the study of children.

Fathers' Relationships with Their Disabled Children: A Literature Review

Fathers' relationships with their disabled children is a neglected topic in the academic literature. This article is the first review of studies in the field, comprising a comprehensive overview of research published since 1980. Forty-five studies met the inclusion criteria. Although fathers emphasise positive aspects of their relationships, existing research foregrounds more negative aspects. These studies tend to identify five themes that signal positive father-child relationships. These themes are: an evolving relationship; caregiving practices; relational aspects of caregiving; recognising and supporting their children's agency; and (inter)connectedness. While fathers' relationships with their disabled children is an under-researched topic, the existing literature on the topic focuses on the negative impact of having a disabled child. Understanding the complexity and rewarding aspects of fathers' engagement warrants further research.