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There is a growing body of study advocating young children’s agency in play and care. Yet little attention has been directed towards addressing how to extend children’s agency to develop a meaningful learning experience for them in a family setting. We used a cultural-historical theoretical framework to investigate six infant-toddlers’ engagement in play and learning at home and early learning centres over a 7-month period. We applied the wholeness approach (Hedegaard, Studying children: A cultural-historical approach, Open University Press, 2008) to interpret the infant-toddlers’ play and their engagement with peers and adults. This approach considers the children’s perspectives, including their body language, gestures, choices, initiatives and movements, and the adults’ pedagogical choices, positioning and demands in play. Visual narrative analysis (Ridgway et al., Video J Educ Pedagogy 1:1–18, 2016) enabled us to capture and map the toddlers’ interactive patterns, non-verbal language and embodied movements and intentions in the play activity settings. Drawing on visual narrative methodology, cultural-historical concepts of imagination and agency were applied to explore El’s, a 21-month-old boy, joint truck play with his parents before dinner time in a home activity setting. The toddler’s agency and how he developed agentic imagination within the joint play under the support of his parents is discussed here. The study argues that adults need to acknowledge toddlers’ agency and motives in play while meeting parents’ demands. The focus child, El, used gesture and simple words to express his intention in continuing joint truck play, although his father explained to El that it was time for dinner and his father was getting tired of continually pushing the truck. In such a conflict, what can adults do to support the child’s intentions and meet adults’ demands? This problem gives rise to a pedagogical intention to think about how to sustain and afford children’s agency in play, thus addressing the conflict when the adults’ demands do not align with the child’s initiative in play. We argue agentic imagination can be a solution to sustain children’s play and meet adults’ agenda.

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Agentic Imagination in Joint Play in a Home Setting

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Liang Li

摘要

There is a growing body of study advocating young children’s agency in play and care. Yet little attention has been directed towards addressing how to extend children’s agency to develop a meaningful learning experience for them in a family setting. We used a cultural-historical theoretical framework to investigate six infant-toddlers’ engagement in play and learning at home and early learning centres over a 7-month period. We applied the wholeness approach (Hedegaard, Studying children: A cultural-historical approach, Open University Press, 2008) to interpret the infant-toddlers’ play and their engagement with peers and adults. This approach considers the children’s perspectives, including their body language, gestures, choices, initiatives and movements, and the adults’ pedagogical choices, positioning and demands in play. Visual narrative analysis (Ridgway et al., Video J Educ Pedagogy 1:1–18, 2016) enabled us to capture and map the toddlers’ interactive patterns, non-verbal language and embodied movements and intentions in the play activity settings. Drawing on visual narrative methodology, cultural-historical concepts of imagination and agency were applied to explore El’s, a 21-month-old boy, joint truck play with his parents before dinner time in a home activity setting. The toddler’s agency and how he developed agentic imagination within the joint play under the support of his parents is discussed here. The study argues that adults need to acknowledge toddlers’ agency and motives in play while meeting parents’ demands. The focus child, El, used gesture and simple words to express his intention in continuing joint truck play, although his father explained to El that it was time for dinner and his father was getting tired of continually pushing the truck. In such a conflict, what can adults do to support the child’s intentions and meet adults’ demands? This problem gives rise to a pedagogical intention to think about how to sustain and afford children’s agency in play, thus addressing the conflict when the adults’ demands do not align with the child’s initiative in play. We argue agentic imagination can be a solution to sustain children’s play and meet adults’ agenda.