Desks: Sites of Institutional Structure and Kids' Agency in a First-Grade Classroom

• In Event: 41.083 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 41.083-13 - Creativity and Agency as Resistance to Governing Discourses in/Outside of the Early Childhood Classroom: Interrogations and Transformative Imaginaries

Abstract

Desks in school are a mechanism for material management and a tool for the reproduction of social norms. They also serve as a place for students’ self-expression and agency. This paper focuses on how young children navigate, manage, and talk about their desks, demonstrating how they negotiate functional expectations of school: they are playfully diligent in their adherence to norms. This playful diligence is a way of understanding the paradox of structure and agency for young children in school. A critical pedagogy is discussed that honors children’s agency and is based on real-time interactions in the classroom with the potential to expand young children’s capabilities (Adair, 2014) and achieve the promise of equal educational opportunity for all.

Author

• Meredith Devennie, Syracuse University