Children's Agency Research Articles

Examining Agency in Children’s Nonfiction Picture Books

Given increased attention toward nonfiction and informational texts due to recent educational reforms in the nation, it is critical to examine how various cultural identities are depicted in nonfiction children’s picture books. Focusing on the Orbis Pictus honor and awarded texts (n = 60) from 1990 to 2019, this article reports the findings of a critical multicultural analysis of the depictions of age, sex, socio-economic status, ethnicities, and geographic regions of these awarded texts. Using a secondary analysis of opportunities for agency, we examine how focal subjects (Crisp in Lang Arts 92(4):241–255, 2015) exert their agency in their respective contexts. Our aim in doing so is to problematize the notion of agency in these texts, specifically understanding who exerts agency, how, and for what purposes. Findings suggest that the authors of these awarded texts rely on highlighting White, European males where agency is typically depicted as an act that occurs in adulthood. As a result, discussion focuses on how such texts, although well-meaning, perhaps perpetuate the traditional notion and passivity of young children in relation to their agency and calls to question the lack of multiple perspectives and voices in the awarded texts.

Fulfilling food practices: Applying the capability approach to ethnographic research in the Northern Netherlands.

Often, food practices are evaluated in terms of their healthiness or lack thereof, but fulfilling food practices based on other values and influenced by family members' capabilities are overlooked. This study analyses food practices in families with low socio-economic status, and aims to explain how family households come to prioritise one food practice over another. We conducted an ethnographic study using the capability approach as an analytical framework. In-depth interviews and observations concerning food patterns and health-related choices with family members from three generations were analysed. Two dimensions of fulfilling food practices which emerged from our study are having a healthy as well as harmonious meal. The families under study tended to prioritise having harmonious meals over having healthy meals, despite the attempts by mothers to serve healthy meals. This choice can be understood from the perspective of capabilities, such as being able to enjoy meals, eating what everybody else eats in the region, avoiding conflicts, creating good relationships with children and serving and organising meals with ease. Within the cultural environment, there prevailed a tendency not to care too much about nutritional outcomes, which also supported the preference for harmonious over healthy meals. In the decision about whether to have a healthy or a harmonious meal, children's agency often outweighed the voices of parents and grandparents. The capability approach helped unravel the complexity of family food practices and the role of intergenerational family dynamics in a setting of low socio-economic status. Acknowledging the multi-dimensional nature of food practices, and including dimensions beyond the food domain, such as harmony at the dinner table, contribute to a better understanding of this complexity. It also helps to shed new light on opportunity deprivation in households, for example in relation to agency, which should be accounted for in health interventions.

Latin American Transnational Children and Youth: Experiences of Nature and Place, Culture and Care across the Americas by Victoria Derr Yolanda Corona (review)

Book Review: Latin American Transnational Children and Youth: Experiences… 157 Latin American Transnational Children and Youth: Experiences of Nature and Place, Culture and Care across the Americas Victoria Derr and Yolanda Corona, editors (2021) Oxford and New York: Routledge, 262 pages $160.00 Hardback, $48.95 eBook; ISBN: 9780367463885 Latin American Transnational Children and Youth: Experiences of Nature and Place, Culture and Care across the Americas illustrates how children and youth perceive, learn about, and care for nature. With scholarship from Latin America and the United States in each section, the text offers stories from migrant and immigrant children and youth. Broadly, the book suggests experiences of childhood are changing over time along with the places with which children have contact. The chapters emphasize the role of family and community in creating a sense of place and identity. Part 1: Perspectives on Place illuminates how children and youth experience, recognize, and understand their experiences with nature. The concept of querencia, articulated by Derr in chapter one, provides a particularly powerful framing for this section as it calls attention to the ways children connect and disconnect from places through emotional attachments or lack thereof. This section gathers diverse cases including rural children in Tepoztlán, Mexico (by Corona, Perez, and Montoya, chapter 2), urban children in Mexico City (by Gulgonen, chapter 3), and Latinx immigrant children in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (by Cuevas, Fritzen-Pedicini, and Beyer, chapter 4). While Querencia is a strong theme throughout the book, it particularly resonates through chapter 4 on migrant children who use their sense of connection to land as a way to create a sense of belonging in new places. Part 2: Homeland, Belonging, and Transnational Identity shows how youths’ relationships to their homeland shapes their transnational identities. This section includes chapters on Amuzgo and Kuchumatán indigenous groups (by Trinidad and Otani, chapter 7), migrant youth who live in Insecure Infantile Migration (by Sánchez, chapter 8), and “1.5 generation” immigrants (by Domínguez, chapter 9). A notable theme in this section is that transnational identity is shaped by experiences with territory, land, and nature. The concept of “geographic habitus” presented by Schmalzbauer in chapter 6 is particularly powerful for understanding how place and environment can be part of transnational identity-making and sense of belonging. Chapter 10 by Derr et al. describes how Latina college students’ environmental identities are shaped by cultural ways of being and belonging in nature. Part 3: Learning and Expressing Care features work on emotional attachments and acts of care toward nature. A strong theme in this final section is decolonial and non-hierarchical forms of education and relationships. This section includes chapters with Zapatista children and intergenerational cultural education (by Montoya, chapter 12), the Chilean Mapuche community program “Listening to Elders” (by Ibarra et al., chapter 13), and early significant life experiences for Book Review: Latin American Transnational Children and Youth: Experiences… 158 environmental professionals (by de la Hoz, chapter 16). These works highlight the role of intergenerational relationships in teaching and learning care for nature. Another theme in this section is that youth participation can be unconventional and necessitates adults' commitment to supporting children's agency. The section includes chapters on science curricula that support indigenous and afro-descendent ways of knowing (by Herrera, chapter 14) and indigenous youth participation in climate justice and advocacy (by Corona and Alvarez, chapter 17). These three sections review different areas of children and youths’ experiences with their environments to advance research in a number of ways. Some of the most prominent areas are research on children and nature from a transnational perspective, the role of family and culture in environmental experiences, environmental and intergenerational education, and children and youths’ participation. These areas of research have impacts for policy on children’s rights, indigenous rights, and education. The book offers an overview of children’s participation, providing a transnational perspective and including several chapters with indigenous groups. Its greatest strength is its broad collection of work. Latin American Transnational Children and Youth includes an array of work from diverse disciplines including anthropology, urban planning, public health, and geography. The chapters include methodologies ranging from statistical analysis to drawings and community-engaged...

Children's Agency and Action in Nature Preschool: A Tale of Two Programs

Integral to sustainability is the active role of citizens to promote and participate in sustainable practices. In this report from the field, we describe two projects that demonstrate how early childhood educators supported children's development of ecologically sustainable practices by facilitating a shift from learning in and about environments to acting in ways that promote regeneration of the natural environment. Two practitioner-researchers, each paired with a critical friend, used the Project Approach as a framework for facilitating children's complex, authentic connections to, understandings of, and actions for their ecosystems, demonstrating the potential of the field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS).

Индивидуальное предприятие «Праздничное агентство» и механизм его продвижения на рынке региональных социокультурных услуг

The relevance of the undertaken research consists in the analysis of economic and pedagogical factors in the activities of a commercial enterprise operating in the market of socio-cultural services of a municipal formation. Nowadays, various agents can engage in the education and enlightenment of the population, their professional activities are fixed by law. As a result, the competition of municipal and commercial leisure offers for the population arises in the market of socio-cultural services. The purpose of the study is to analyze the conditions for the implementation of the service of a children's and family holiday and its promotion to the market by a commercial agency that carries out its professional activities in the municipality of a Siberian city. Objectives. Among the studied tasks, we can note such as the study of the mechanism of promotion of a holiday agency to the market of socio-cultural services of a small city, including such marketing components as the study of the service market and existing competitors, the analysis of the segment of service consumers, the study of supply and demand for the service and the development of a turnkey service. Methodology. The leading empirical method of the study was a survey of residents of Tulun, Irkutsk region, and specialists in the field of culture engaged in the professional field of eventing. Results. The practical significance of the undertaken research is that the results obtained during it will allow other subjects of the market of socio-cultural services to provide a stable mechanism of functioning, thereby contributing to the expansion of the range of holiday services and improving its quality. The conclusions of the study are based on the need to introduce a wide range of festive events for children of all age groups, as well as inclusive holidays for children with special needs to the market of social and cultural services in the city of Tulun, Irkutsk region. It is assumed that due to the attention to children with special needs and the implementation of holidays in partnership with municipal institutions, the children's holiday agency, as the object of this study, will receive undeniable advantages in promoting its services in the city's holiday services market.

STEM learning ecologies: collaborative pedagogies for supporting transitions to school

ABSTRACT This paper considers the pedagogical collaborations between early childhood teachers in kindergarten (4 years) and the first year of school (5 years) in one Australian State. We report on a year-long project that brought these early childhood teachers together as we asked them to design STEM learning ecologies that would not only support new learning, but also provide a context for a meaningful transition from kindergarten to the first year of school. A transition that went beyond familiarisation with the new school environment to creating reciprocal pedagogical collaborations. In their collective discussions the teachers indicated that they wanted to encourage children's agency. This provoked them to think creatively about their pedagogical designs. Being part of the project encouraged collaborative pedagogical conversations between all participants around children's voice and advocacy, the practices of noticing and generating questions as the basis of investigations and extending play-based inquiries from the kindergarten into the school context. This paper explores the ways in which these pedagogical encounters occurred. In the process, the teachers reflected on the shift from a traditional view of transition as being ‘school ready’ to one in which pedagogical conversations and documentation were elevated to focus on innovative designs for learning.

Leader–member exchange and organizational climate effects on clinician turnover intentions

PurposeClinician turnover in mental health settings impacts service quality, including availability and delivery of evidence-based practices. Leadership is associated with organizational climate, team functioning and clinician turnover intentions (TI). This study examines leader–member exchange (LMX), reflecting the relationship between a supervisor and each supervisee, using mean team LMX, dispersion of individual clinician ratings compared to team members (i.e. relative LMX) and team level variability (i.e. LMX differentiation), in relation to organizational climate and clinician TI.Design/methodology/approachSurvey data were collected from 363 clinicians, nested in children's mental health agency workgroups, providing county-contracted outpatient services to youth and families. A moderated mediation path analysis examined cross-level associations of leader–member exchange with organizational climate and turnover intentions.FindingsLower relative LMX and greater LMX differentiation were associated with higher clinician TI. Higher team-level demoralizing climate also predicted higher TI. These findings indicate that poorer LMX and more variability in LMX at the team level are related to clinician TI.Originality/valueThis study describes both team- and clinician-level factors on clinician TI. Few studies have examined LMX in mental health, and fewer still have examined relative LMX and LMX differentiation associations with organizational climate and TI. These findings highlight the importance of leader–follower relationships and organizational climate and their associations with clinician TIs. Mental health service systems and organizations can address these issues through fostering more positive supervisor–supervisee relationships.

Reading with Minor Feelings: Racialized Emotions and Children’s (Non)agency in Judges 10–12

Abstract In this article, I read the story of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 10–12 within the contemporary context of racism and discrimination in the U.S. Particularly focusing on the affective and emotional dimensions of the lived experiences in racially/ethnically minoritized communities, I engage the biblical story with what poet and writer Cathy Park Hong calls, “minor feelings.” Reading the biblical narrative alongside Hong’s crudely personal—and yet pervasively common—accounts of Asian American racial trauma, I critically reflect on the notion of childhood agency, and suggest that the Western conception of agency neither reflects nor promotes the lives of the children in minority groups. In turn, I ask: What if we moved away from the traditional notions of agency and voice in our critical works, and, instead, turned towards emotions, sensations, and other embodied experiences as a site of interpretation, critique, and movement for social change?

CHILDREN AGAINST SLAVERY: JUVENILE AGENCY AND THE SUGAR BOYCOTTS IN BRITAIN

AbstractIn late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, many contemporaries observed a striking phenomenon: that children were especially active in the boycotts of sugar produced by enslaved people. First-hand accounts often suggested that children's activism was unilateral and unmediated, whereas historians of British abolitionism have tended to assume that children were passive recipients of antislavery literature and adult influence. Engaging with both the historiography on British abolitionism and the new histories of childhood, this article examines the nature of juvenile engagement within the sugar boycotts. Collecting together some of the extensive but dispersed evidence of juvenile antislavery across the country, and focusing upon a case study of the Plymley household of Shropshire during the early 1790s, we explore the intricacies of children's involvement. Children's agency, we argue, needs to be understood as a specific, historicised phenomenon. Adults often chose to represent children's abolitionist activities as self-determined, for their participation in the boycotts affirmed both adult positions and their own child-rearing practices. However, whilst adults frequently solicited particular types of juvenile response, children often responded independently and in unexpected ways, negotiating their own positions in relation to their parents, siblings, and peers. We situate juvenile antislavery as a recursive process, operating within complex, intergenerational interactions.

Dyadic Relationships between a Surviving Parent and Children in Widowed Families: A Systematic Scoping Review.

The death of a family member affects not only individual family members but also their relationships and interactions. Grief has been studied mostly as an intrapersonal experience. Adopting the family perspective, this systematic scoping review focused on parent-child relationships in widowed families so as to identify what is already known on this topic and the research gaps for future study. The review follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. Four databases (Web of Science, Psycinfo, PubMed, and CINAHL Plus) were searched. Search terms were combinations of two concepts: (1) loss of a parent (20 terms) and (2) parent-child (eight terms). 5,419 studies were identified during the search, of which 36 studies were included in the review following two rounds of screening. Four research themes emerged, and the aggregated findings were identified: (a) The surviving parent and children are likely to become closer following the loss of a parent, while other relevant factors need to be taken into account; (b) Better parent-child relationships play a protective role in children's adjustment to loss; (c) The surviving parent and children's adjustment to loss are interdependent; (d) Through parenting, communication style, coping strategy, and other attributes, the surviving parent can influence their children's adjustment. Gender and age differences were identified in parent-child relationships. The findings further justify the importance of a family perspective when conducting research and practice on bereavement. Several research gaps were identified. Existing studies paid insufficient attention to children's agency and bidirectional relationships, and the interaction process and its role underlying parent-child bidirectional causality. A conceptual framework of parent-child relationships in widowed families is proposed based on these findings.

Neurobiological limits and the somatic significance of love: Caregivers' engagements with neuroscience in Scottish parenting programmes.

While parents have long received guidance on how to raise children, a relatively new element of this involves explicit references to infant brain development, drawing on brain scans and neuroscientific knowledge. Sometimes called ‘brain-based parenting’, this has been criticised from within sociological and policy circles alike. However, the engagement of parents themselves with neuroscientific concepts is far less researched. Drawing on 22 interviews with parents/carers of children (mostly aged 0–7) living in Scotland, this article examines how they account for their (non-)use of concepts and understandings relating to neuroscience. Three normative tropes were salient: information about children’s processing speed, evidence about deprived Romanian orphans in the 1990s, and ideas relating to whether or not children should ‘self-settle’ when falling asleep. We interrogate how parents reflexively weigh and judge such understandings and ideas. In some cases, neuroscientific knowledge was enrolled by parents in ways that supported biologically reductionist models of childhood agency. This reductionism commonly had generative effects, enjoining new care practices and producing particular parent and infant subjectivities. Notably, parents do not uncritically adopt or accept (sometimes reductionist) neurobiological and/or psychological knowledge; rather, they reflect on whether and when it is applicable to and relevant for raising their children. Thus, our respondents draw on everyday epistemologies of parenting to negotiate brain-based understandings of infant development and behaviour, and invest meaning in these in ways that cannot be fully anticipated (or appreciated) within straightforward celebrations or critiques of the content of parenting programmes drawing on neuropsychological ideas.

Agency and Sovereignty: Georges Bataille's Anti-Humanist Conception of Child

Abstract Georges Bataille (1887–1962) is one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century, whose anti-humanist anthropology influenced subsequent existentialist and post-structuralist philosophy. His wide-ranging writings (across philosophy, archaeology, economics, sociology, poetry, erotica and history of art) frequently mention children, childhood and childishness, and yet there has hitherto been little to no attention paid to this aspect of his work. This article opens up a neglected theme in Bataille studies, and also explores the consequences of Bataille's presentation of the human condition for our understanding of the pedagogical relationship. Of particular interest is the idea of the agentic child, which occupies such an important place in childhood studies, educational theory and public policy. In the light of Bataille's anthropology, I shall explore the idea that the pursuit of children's agency is the victim of its vaunting ambition.

Environmental Education and Children's Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene

Environmental Education and Children's Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene

Neoliberalism and sociocultural specificities: a discourse analysis of early childhood curriculum policies in Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore

ABSTRACT Many governments have launched the top-down early childhood curriculum (ECC) reforms to enhance the accountability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. The present discourse analysis of latest ECC policies across four diverse but representative countries – Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore – aims to examine the effects of neoliberalism and contextualization through within- and cross-case analyses. Our findings revealed that despite the mutual interactions and similarities, neoliberal ECC policies had been developed in context-specific ways across countries. Children's agency had been commonly valued to recognize its essential role in effective learning, which was constructed in play, social interaction, and community participation. Moreover, Australia and New Zealand emphasized the development of the culturally competent child on top of children's holistic development, without segregating children's learning into domains. These findings demonstrate the confounding effect produced by the diverse shaping forces in terms of defining the ideal ECC across countries – ‘curriculum hybridization’.

Children’s Abilities, Freedom, and the Process of Capability-Formation

ABSTRACT When thinking about children's entitlements, priority tends to be given to protecting their well-being achievements, while limiting their entitlement to exercise freedoms and agency. An assumption of “inability” is used as the grounding justification for limiting children's freedom and agency. Using the capability approach (CA) as a method to conceptualise what is owed to individuals, this article shows that the justifiability of restricting freedom to “unable” individuals is not as straightforward as assumed. Understanding the role that abilities play in justifiably limiting freedom requires an assessment of what being “(un)able” means, and how this “inability” may translate into particular privileges or restrictions. The article, thus, intends to give an answer to the following questions: first, how should the concept of “ability” be understood within the CA? And, second, how does ability bind our understanding of the legitimate restriction of freedom and agency? The article offers a response to the first question through an evolving and dynamic understanding of “ability.” It claims, moreover, that the process through which abilities develop (the process of capability-formation) ought to be taken into account when assessing what is owed to an individual as a matter of justice.

Considering medical assistance in dying for minors: the complexities of children’s voices

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation in Canada followed much deliberation after the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in Carter v. Canada. Included in this deliberation was the Special Joint...

Children's perspectives on their economic activity—Diversity, motivations and parental awareness

AbstractThis research investigates how children from an affluent city in the UK exercise agency to construct their economic worlds. A survey (n = 484) showed that children (ages 10 to 14 years) conduct a range of monetary and non‐monetary activities. A second study (n = 83) with diaries, self‐documentation, and parental questionnaires, showed that children's economic activity involves individual and social motivations, occurs in formal and informal contexts, and is often self‐regulated. Parents acknowledge children's monetary activities and neglect non‐monetary activities. The results suggest that children's agency unfolds in diverse economic activities shaped by contextual factors and interactions with peers and parents, thereby supporting a relational view of children's agency.

Guiding children towards individual and collective growth. Educative participatory experiences in a preschool setting

ABSTRACTThis article is based on a fieldwork study that explored a 1-year-long process of integrating children's human rights-respecting practice in a preschool through a project with a popular culture theme. Drawing on John Dewey's educational theory, educative participatory experience is suggested as a useful concept to further understand and develop different forms of participation practices. The twofold aim of the article is to demonstrate the children's educative participatory experiences and relate these to the teacher's acknowledgement of both children's collective agency and their individual capacity to participate. The methods used are semi-structured interviews and video-documented and participatory observations. The data mainly consists of field notes, video recordings, photographs and transcripts. The results show that the teachers are viewing the children, and providing possibilities for them to act, as knowledgeable experts, competent conflict-solvers and reflective and caring practitioners. Furthermore, they consider both the children's individual and collective rights and responsibilities when creating a rights-respecting preschool environment.

An investigation into children's agency: children's initiatives and practitioners’ responses in Finnish early childhood education

ABSTRACT This paper investigates adult–child interaction in the early years of education. The intention is to understand how children's initiatives and practitioners’ responses support and/or hinder children's agency. Our ethnographic data include 150 h of video data supplemented by observational field notes from a Finnish Early Childhood Education (ECE) centre with eight five-year-old children and two ECE practitioners. The video data were analysed abductively by using an Interaction Analysis method. The children's initiatives were found to manifest in several modes, namely asking a question, suggesting, challenging, refusing and ideating. The responses to these initiatives by the ECE practitioners included accepting, accepting after a rejection, adapting, rejecting or ignoring. The analysis points to ways in which adult–child relationships are negotiated in everyday activities, showing the relational nature of agency and suggesting that the ways in which adult engages in the child's initiations are an intricate part of children's agency.

Beyond Behavior: Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Variation in Parental Ethnotheories of Children's Prosocial Helping.

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers’ reports about their toddlers’ involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children’s prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups – US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European-American families – were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study’s analytic focus was the linguistic form of mothers’ responses to interview questions asking about the child’s efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children’s agency and children’s prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children’s contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children’s agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children’s autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children’s helpfulness is socialized in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European-American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child’s efforts to help with linguistic forms that “pivoted” to either the mother as the focal agent in the child’s prosocial engagement or to reframing the child’s involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children’s prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community.