“This isn’t my real writing”: The fate of children’s agency in too-tight curricula

ABSTRACT

In this article, I adopt a practice theory consideration of student agency, that is, I consider students’ power to act on their interests and intentions, on their own inclinations; this will-to-act-on-the-world is central to becoming an active, adaptive participant across the life span. As practice theorist Shery Ortner has explained, none of us have unencumbered agency; we are all constrained and empowered by the institutional structures within which we live. Influenced by practice theory, I draw on ethnographic studies to examine the dynamics through which increasingly structured classrooms for young school children may dampen child agency or push it underground or out-of-school, thereby pushing out as well important dimensions of children’s intellectual energy. I conclude with a consideration of what makes young children’s composing, or any constructive and creative act, willful and intentional, that is, “real.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional Resources

1. Paley, V.G. (2009). The importance of fantasy, fairness, and friendship in children’s play: An interview with Vivian Gussin Paley. American Journal of Play, 2, pp. 121–138.

During the 1970s, Vivian Paley began writing about her experiences as a preschool and kindergarten teacher. She emphasized the importance of children’s play and, based on that play, their storytelling and enacting. All these forms of composing a link to children’s worries and dreams and to their desires for companionship. When children dictate and enact their stories, they reconsider, that is, revise them as they recompose them. In this interview, Paley talks about her pedagogical means for valuing and building on children’s play. I consider Paley’s work foundational to the teaching of writing at any level. For Paley, composing is, literally, an act of play.

2. Comber, B. (2016). Literacy, place, and pedagogies of possibility. New York, NY: Routledge.

Writing must be relevant to children’s lives as children, and children’s agency—their control over writing tasks—is what propels growth. So agrees Barbara Comber in this inspiring book based on decades of collaborative work with elementary teachers. Across the grades, teachers and students turn to their low-income neighborhoods and find sources of joy and companionship to represent and communicate, and, moreover, they find opportunities to contribute to a better world by, for example, contributing to the preservation of local animal habitats or helping to reimagine their school building—or even their own neighborhoods and homes. Knowing local history, local governance, and local reformers all helps children reimagine a world more hospitable to children, a world that, at varied pedagogical points, takes textual shape.

3. Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. Haas. (2009). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

In this book, Genishi and Dyson juxtapose the diversity of young school children and the uniformity of current curricula. They feature a diversity of children, among them Mexican American children whose native language is an indigenous one, and African American children who speak African American Language. Using a rich array of examples of child language users, they include illustrations of how children move into composing and how their resources and intentions can be overlooked given narrow curricula. The book features both teachers and children who do not follow benchmarked pedagogical scripts.