From Resistance to Involvement: Examining Agency and Control in a Playworld Activity

Abstract

In the recent sociocultural literature, it is possible to identify at least three ways of understanding the development of individual agency in social practices: (a) through transforming the object of activity and through self-change, (b) through responsible and intentional membership, and (c) through resistance and transformation of the dominant power relations. This article puts these different perspectives in a dialogical relation to each other and examines the development of individual agency in the context of schooling. The problem of promoting student agency is that, although personal sense and motivation are crucial for learning and development, the need for control and order in classrooms often makes it hard for teachers to give space to them. To develop more meaningful educational practices, there is a need for a thorough understanding of the ways through which teachers and students deal with and momentarily overcome this contradiction in their classrooms and are able to enact or promote agency. The article introduces an empirical case study of Anton, a 7-year-old boy's participation in a joint narrative classroom practice. Anton's orientation and interest toward the narrative activity alters drastically during the spring, as does the teachers' understanding and attitude toward him. Moreover, in Anton's participation, all the three different formulations of agency just presented are visible and concurrently “in action.” The article creates conceptual and analytical tools for examining the potential that narrative learning settings provide for supporting children's engagement and development in classrooms.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Professor Yrjö Engeström, Docent Jussi Silvonen, and Professor Pentti Hakkarainen for their critical and constructive comments on this article. I also thank my colleagues, especially Riikka Hofmann, Sonja Baumer, Michalis Contopodis, Beth Ferholt, Stephanie Freeman, and Marika Schaupp, for the inspiring discussions on the data analysis presented in this article. Thank you to Jamie Donovan, Johanna Hynönen, and Steven Spencer for translating the data excerpts and for helpful comments on language. Finally, I thank all the reviewers for their invaluable comments on my article.

Notes

¹All real names of the children have been changed. In the data excerpts in the fourth section, T1, T2, and T3 refer to the teachers; AR refers to the researcher.

²The class has emerged as a result of a longitudinal (1996–2003) pilot study lead by the University of Oulu in Finland. The aim of the project was to develop an integrated method for learning and teaching in early education setting and make a transition from preschool to school more flexible (Hakkarainen, 2006).

³ Haavisto (2002) used Linell's initiative analysis in her research of court interaction in Finland, and Mäkitalo's (2005) analysis of the responsive and initiative nature of dialogue in interactions between nurses and patients in elderly care was based on Linell's theory.

⁴As a technical help for the analysis I used an open source data analysis program called Transana (developed by Chris Fassnacht and David Woods).

⁵Elsewhere (Hofmann & Rainio, 2007) we have analyzed a comparable way of manifesting not only individual agency but what we conceptualized as “shared agency” among the students and the teacher in a narrative classroom activity.