ABSTRACT

This article develops an emergentist theory of children’s agency. To make this claim, it first identifies the following two predicaments that scholars have faced in children’s agency research: 1) social ambiguity in distinguishing children’s learning from adults’ guidance, and 2) causal uncertainty between children’s cognitive development and the affordance of their social contexts. Then, this article discusses tedate, a type of instructional scaffolding that uses these predicaments to foster agency in classrooms. It explains tedate through a two-step process: 1) situating students as liminal beings who use everyday objects as a heuristic for solving problems and a pivot to enter imaginary worlds, and 2) developing students’ reflexivity by helping them articulate everyday objects as signs of their literacy. In doing so, this article puts forth an emergentist theory that argues tedate helps children develop their capacity for agency by introducing everyday objects in subject lessons that build their reflexivity and literacies.

摘要

本文提出了一种关于儿童能动性的紧急理论。为了提出这一主张，它首先确定了学者在儿童能动性研究中面临的以下两个困境：1）在区分儿童学习与成人指导方面的社会模糊性，以及2）儿童认知发展与其社会背景的可承受性之间的因果不确定性. 然后，本文讨论了tedate，一种利用这些困境来培养课堂能动性的教学脚手架。它解释了tedate通过两步过程：1) 将学生定位为阈限生物，他们使用日常物品作为解决问题的启发式方法和进入想象世界的枢纽，以及 2) 通过帮助他们将日常物品表达为他们的读写能力的标志来培养学生的反思能力. 在这样做的过程中，本文提出了一种紧急理论，认为tedate通过在学科课程中引入日常物品来培养他们的反思能力和读写能力，帮助孩子发展他们的代理能力。