Examining Children's Agency Within Participatory Structures in Primary Science Investigations

• In Event: 68.026 - Researching Student Agency in Educational Interactions: Sociocultural Approaches and Methodological Insights

Abstract

This research examines the use of participatory structures with children in a fourth grade classroom as they engage in an inquiry-based science unit. We consider to what extent participatory structures mediate children's agency in science investigations. Using a combination of ethnographic and design experiment methods, we zoom in on a case study of one child, Leonardo, and his collaborative activities with peers, to contextualize the process and underscore the claim that participatory structures can create spaces for children to take agency in different ways.

We consider agency to be the “socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001, p. 112). Accordingly, we adopt dialectical perspectives on agency and structure, and in the dynamic interactions between the two, refine our understandings. Structures are often described as rules and resources (Sewell, 1992), and they can be, for example, material structures such as curricula if we are examining classroom events, or historically constituted structures, such as a teacher's expectation for learning–teaching task completion.

This study was conducted with a class of 16 racially, social-economically, and linguistically diverse fourth grade students (10–11 years old) at an urban primary school in Luxembourg. Using critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996) and design experimentation (Brown, 1992), lessons in an inquiry-based unit were analyzed to inform the design of the next lesson. This allowed us (teacher-researchers) to adapt our teaching, our instructional tools, as well as our research, to the specific needs of the class as we interpreted them. Our central data source is video- and audio-recording of all science lessons as well as interviews with children during and after the completion of the unit. Whole-class as well as small-group videos were analyzed.

We focus our analysis on one critical case, Leonardo, and argue that within open-ended classroom structures, students are able to take agency in a manner that positions their approaches to science as enabling student design of investigations for tackling their own questions. We describe how Leonardo pursued his own questions, which were not necessarily aligned with the questions of his peers, or the expectations of the teachers-researchers. This student took agency in a manner that afforded his engaging in investigations, and that shifted the structuring of the thematic science unit.

We seek to contextualize the role of “agency” as an educational outcome arising from participatory classroom processes (e.g., Doyle, 2015), and three overarching claims emerge from the data analyses. First, open-ended, participatory curricular structures provided spaces for children to engage in the “doing” of science (Siry, Ziegler & Max, 2012), and through this doing, their ideas and understandings were produced and emerged through agentic investigations. Second, in the taking of agency within open-ended activities, children engaged in science were positioned as resource-rich participants. This provided them with access to differing understandings and perspectives. Third, through the agency | structure relationship, classroom structures were transformed, and students and teacher–researchers were positioned in new ways. This study contributes to social research more broadly for understanding and researching agency and structure as a dialectic.

Authors

• Christina Siry, University of Luxembourg

• Sara E.D. Wilmes, University of Luxembourg

• Jana Maria Haus