Agency and Discrimination

• In Event: 54.060 - The Role of Agency and Control in Early Educational Equity

Abstract

This paper is meant to begin the symposium by conceptually linking agency to discrimination. This linkage begins with a focus on the connection between agency and capability expansion from the work of Sen (2003) in development economics as well as the literature on deficit thinking (Gutiérrez, Morales and Martinez. 2009) and white privilege (Leonardo, 2002) in education. In Sen’s capabilities approach to development, people and nations are seen as requiring agency in order to expand capabilities. Sen (1999) and ul Haq (2003) critiqued global skepticism that countries like India could handle making their own decisions. They explain that denying agency to countries like India only ends up justifying that denial as people are unable to use their agency and so are unable to prove and improve what they know and can do.

This paper applies this connection between how we think about people to how much agency they are able to use in their everyday life to the early childhood educational experiences of young children of Latino immigrants. Early childhood educational settings with significant numbers of Latino children of immigrants sometimes have strong teachers and programs with tremendous insight into the cultural, linguistic, academic and social capabilities of Latino children of immigrants (Genishi & Dyson, 2015). More often, however, Latina/o children of immigrants beginning the Prek-3 trajectory face significant pressures to achieve, overly strict environments, racist encounters with peers and teachers and learning contexts that devalue their intuition, creativity, cultural knowledge and autonomy (Gándara & Contreras, 2009; Valenzuela,1999). The schooling experience often begins by being labeled as not knowing English or not being ready for school–labels associated with a deficit perspective of immigrant families (Martínez, 2013).

After a conceptual connection between agency and discrimination in the particular case of the Latina/o immigrant communities I have worked with over the past ten years, this paper then turns to a specific study in which we spent two years filming examples of agentic learning environments in classrooms where the majority of students were Latina/o children of immigrants. Using the video-cued ethnographic method, we showed the films to over 200 administrators, teachers, parents and 6-7 year old children in schools serving Latina/o immigrant families. Participants were asked to explain and justify the types of early learning experiences that were best for young children of Latina/o immigrants. The study yielded a strong relationship between deficit ideas and the types of learning experiences young children were offered. Most adult participants (excluding parents) saw children as not being able to handle dynamic kinds of learning experiences. And the number one reason given was that children arrived at school with much less vocabulary because they were poor and because their parents were immigrants.

Along with the other papers in this session, this paper is meant to reconceptualize agency in terms of discrimination by showing that the types and amount of agency young children can use in their learning can be an indicator of discrimination.

Author

• Jennifer Keys Adair, The University of Texas - Austin