Sense of Agency and Everyday Life: Children's Perspective

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

Abstract

As Bruner (1996), among others, has argued, assessing what education does to children’s awareness of their possibilities for action, their sense of agency, is crucial for understanding the quality of education. Moreover, a sense of agency is important not just as an outcome, but also as a measure of the goodness-of-fit between participants and educational practice. That is, the extent to which educational practices can enable children’s sense of agency is argued to be conducive to the quality of their engagement (Fuchs et al. 2003). Despite this acknowledged importance, less attention has been given to examining how children experience their agency in their day-to-day life and how different settings and situations play into their sense of agency.

This presentation discusses a co-participatory study on children's sense of agency. In contrast to cognitive or phenomenological frameworks (Gallagher, 2012), sense of agency is conceptualized here from a socio-cultural perspective which highlights its situative, distributed, and mediated nature (Wertsch, Tulviste & Hagstrom, 1996). In other words, sense of agency is conceptualized as a socially constructed and materially mediated relation between an individual's capabilities, aspirations, and perceived opportunities and limitations to take action with a given practice. In addition, to address the under theoretization of the individual actor within socio-cultural frameworks, we draw on narrative semiotics, and especially the notion of modalities of agency (Greimas & Porter, 1977). In specific, we ask: i) How do children draw on different modalities to characterize their own agency when reflecting on different practices of their life, and ii) What kind of insights can be drawn from these reflections regarding their sense of agency in these practices?

The empirical data of this study consists of open-ended interviews (Patton, 2002) of two Finnish girls and two boys, aged 9–10 years. Prior to the interviews the children documented their everyday life over a three day period with digital cameras. The function of these photos was to assist the children in their reflections via familiar and culturally meaningful mediational means (Schoultz, Säljö, & Wyndhamn, 2001) as well as provide a joint point of reference for the discussion. The analysis of these interviews proceeded through multiple iterative phases during which the content of interaction as well as its social construction in evolving interactions was investigated (Erickson, 2006). Finally, an analytical framework focusing on the modalities of agency was used to analyze the social construction of children’s sense of agency.

The results of the study show the richness and elaborateness of the children’s accounts on their agency. In the interviews, the children positioned themselves – via the modalities – dominantly as having the competencies to engage in the different practices of their everyday life. Their perspective also entailed a nuanced understanding of the conflictual and contested nature of agency. In all, the analysis highlights the particularity of individual engagement in collective activities (e.g., Nasir & Hand, 2008) and thus contributes to existing descriptions of the dynamics of their connectedness which have emphasized social level processes.

Authors

• Jaakko Hilppö, Northwestern University

• Lasse Lipponen, University of Helsinki

• Kristiina P. Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki

• Marika Virlander, University of Helsinki