Agile Agency: Applying its Three Principles to Calibrate Adult Lenses While Supporting Young Children's Spontaneous Agency

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce the concept of ‘agile agency’ in children. ‘Agile agency’ is characterised by its non-linear fluidity that traverses along a sliding scale that is akin to an agency barometer. Its changes in magnitude and nature are responses to contextual factors that may be relational, environmental, and temporal. Using the case study of a four-year-old girl pseudonymised as Sophia from my doctoral research on 3–5-year-old children-led play at home and two London nurseries, I posit the following three principles of ‘agile agency’. Firstly, a child's agency is agile as it oscillates along a sliding scale, and it adapts in nature and degree in response to shifts in the immediate environment and to contextual shifts over longer periods of time. As per the second principle, agile agency is interpreted differently when filtered through the role-driven socio-cultural lenses of teachers, parents, and researchers. The third principle asserts that the interpretation of a child's agency is not only varied between different adults' lenses but also within an individual adults' viewpoint. Such fluctuations in an individual's viewpoint can result from shifts in contexts that may be physical, relational, and temporal. As child-initiated play is a vital part of the everyday life in early childhood, Sophia's case study serves as a rich context for examining how children's complex agency unfolds within enabling and restricting environments facilitated by adults. In doing so, the paper proposes broader theoretical generalisability of the three principles as a framework to accommodate agile agency's variability and complexity, and inform how adults working with children in various capacities can better understand and support their complex, and often rapidly changing spontaneous agency.