Anna Pauliina Rainio

The dialectics of agency in educational ethnography

ABSTRACT This paper outlines a dialectical conceptualisation of children’s agency for the purposes of multidisciplinary educational theory and practice. We illuminate five contradictory but connected dimensions of children’s agency, or the dialectics of agency, identified from theoretical debate between sociologically and psychologically oriented educational literature: Agency (1) as enacted and imagined; (2) as situatively emergent and progressively developmental; (3) as dependence and separation; (4) as mastery and submission; and (5) as control and freedom. We examine these contradictions ‘at work’ in an ethnographic early education case study. We argue that the children’s struggles towards agency and adults’ efforts and failures to support children in their struggles can be conceptualised as a dialectical movement that has a potential to develop the educational practice itself. Our dialectical reading of both data and theory helps to highlight the challenges the practitioners face when supporting children’s agency and the solutions they implement when doing so.

Children's Sense of Agency in Preschool: A Sociocultural Investigation.

ABSTRACT This socioculturally informed study investigated children’s sense of agency in relation to their everyday life in preschool. The empirical data comprised focus groups reflection situations wherein Finnish preschool children (n. 19, aged 6–7) reflected on their everyday life with the help of photographs and drawings they made. Building on a situative and discursive take on the sense of agency, the results of this study highlight the different forms of the sense of agency talked into being in the focus groups. The results also provide evidence of the different activities within which children’s sense of agency was embedded. In addition, the study also engages with the notion of radical passivity to theoretically explore the borders of the concept of the sense of agency. In all, the study demonstrates the mundane side of children’s sense of agency and its subtle dynamics in day-to-day life in preschool.

Teacher Support of Student Engagement in Early Childhood: Embracing Ambivalence through Playworlds.

Abstract Ambivalence is a relatively little advanced concept for studying young people’s engagement in education. We present a case study in which a teacher of a kindergarten-first-grade classroom works within an activity called a playworld to engage a child who had been excluded from certain classroom practices, after having been perceived by his teachers as disengaged and disruptive. Playworlds are defined as adult–child joint play activities inspired by Vygotsky’s theories of play, art, and imagination. We argue that when the teacher embraced this child’s ambivalent participation, ambivalence itself appeared to be an important component of an evolving process of personally meaningful engagement. We showcase those elements of the playworld activity that may support early childhood teachers in embracing ambivalence.