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Article Excerpt
Abstract: This study is an exploration of how children exert agency in an attempt to understand and influence communication, language, and the formation of value systems within the adult world of the elementary school system. The findings indicate that gender is negotiated among peers, and is particularly evident when children engage in behaviors associated with the opposing gender. The findings also support the assertion that the structure within which peer interactions occur may also strongly influence the degree to which children are free to reinterpret the meanings and messages from the larger adult world.
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Children manifest agency through interaction in numerous ways and in multiple settings (Corsaro, 1997; Currie, 1997; Milkie, 1994). For the purposes of this study, agency is defined as the ability to successfully negotiate the messages and meanings inherent within our value system as such messages occur in daily conversation and interaction. In other words, children do not simply accept the adult world as it is offered to them through parents, authority figures, or the media. Instead, through interaction with others, children are able to explore the messages they encounter in their everyday lives. Children are also able to influence communication, language, and therefore the formation of value systems as authorities from particular standpoints: as individuals among groups; as knowledgeable (and able to transmit that knowledge) of their position within the group; and as authorities on the institution of childhood that adults (regardless of training or memory) are unable to claim.
This study focuses on communication among children and between children and adults, particularly exploring the extent to which children are able to engage in agentic communication, influence the wider audience, and exert themselves as an authority in a social environment that does not usually view children as such. In the child's world, there are obvious authority figures, whose very existence may seem to diminish individual child authority (Kollock, et al, 1985). The structure of these relationships is evident in almost every social setting in which the child is involved, including the family, school, church, and larger social world, all of which are managed by adults (Allen, 2002; Foucault, 1981; Foucault, 1977). The routinized nature of the school setting offers a particularly clear location in which to explore the ability of the child to exhibit agency and exert knowledge claims in an environment steeped in a structure of authority and adult rule. Therefore, the focus of this study is an exploration of how children communicate to exert agency within the adult world of the elementary school system.
Current Research on Children and Agency
Past research has often viewed children as passive recipients of social messaging, but more recent study has provided insight into the child's ability to act as a selective agent. In this way, children sometimes internalize meanings and messages, sometimes combine them, and, at other times, choose none of the prescribed values. Scholars have documented the evidence of such agentic behavior in children (Corsaro, 1997; Corsaro, 1992; Currie, 1997; Milkie, 1994; Thorne, 1997), providing a basis for understanding the development of the social self, the individual within a group, and the importance of childhood in general as a place to look for knowledge and social understanding (Corsaro, 1997; Currie, 1997; Milkie, 1994).
Corsaro (1997) emphasizes the agentic process inherent in interaction in his perspective of interpretive reproduction (Corsaro, 1997) which implies that children are active, not passive, participants who dynamically negotiate meaning within the child's peer culture. The process entails the continual appropriation and interpretation of meaning by the child learned about and taught by the normative adult world, the filtering of such messages through the unique peer culture of the child, and the active contribution to both adult and child perception of meaning. This process occurs at the level of interaction, where meaning is interpreted, negotiated, and reaffirmed through peer culture.
Corsaro (1997) also describes the interaction and negotiation occurring in everyday routines as most easily identified as agentic. The school system provides a valuable opportunity to examine the child via the everyday routine, in that the school day is a consistently structured environment where children are able to learn the rules of the social group in which they participate. Through interaction steeped in such everyday relationships and routines, children are able to learn the "rules" of the social group in which they are a part, while at the same time they may negotiate the meaning of these rules, in part because of a lack of understanding concerning the meaning or their place in the social group, but also as they "play with" or "explore" this social world.
Through observation of peer interaction, agentic behavior has been consistently documented (Corsaro, 1997). Agentic behavior is often most clearly recognizable when the child does not act in accordance with prescribed expectations, be that for gender, age, or while engaging in a particular event or activity. This is not to say that agentic behavior only occurs as a refutation of prescribed values or meanings, but that it is when those manifestations are evidenced that the process is most clear. Therefore, examples of behavior and attitudes which are consistent with the expectations prescribed may also serve as evidence of construction of meaning through interaction. It is then the process that most clearly serves as evidence of the negotiation, not the manifested outcome. Through social interaction, meaning is produced across social groups, between children, and between children and the adult world.
The implications of research on agency in children are many. Corsaro (1997) argues that children have been marginalized within academic literature, that they have been dismissed as recipients of culture and not as influential, and that this has not served to understand the reflexive nature of childhood as both reflective of and influential to the society in which they live. Changing views on childhood have historically impacted the lived experiences of the children which they define, and a view of the child as able to negotiate, interpret, and reproduce social meaning will provide heightened esteem and value to children as individual social members. Such value is manifested in language about and to children, as well as language used by children with children. As children have little or no representation in the academic world (Corsaro 1997), such an understanding of the child as individual also encourages adults to consider the ways that these processes are initiated and maintained, including a careful consideration of the responsibility inherent in the ways we speak about and to children. The practical application of expanded theories of childhood is often to improve children's real lived experience; it is the effort to ensure the economic and educational welfare of children, enrich the lives of children and their families, provide support and information to parents as they facilitate their children's experiences, and to combat violence against children by reinforcing the agentic value and importance of children in the social group.
Power Distance and the Elementary School
An important clement of the authority structure within the school system is the degree to which power distance (Hofstede 1984; Mulder, 1976, 1977), or the "interpersonal power or influence ... as perceived by the least powerful of the two" (Hofstede 1984, p. 70), informs the relationship between teachers and students. Of further concern are the ways that power distance might influence the process of negotiation and influence the level of teacher-student interaction.
The basis of a power distance norm has been located in the family group, school system, and other key socializing institutions (Hofstede 1994). Much of the evidence of different levels of power distance across cultures has originated in organizational research at the adult level, but many have argued that these relationships fundamentally originate in early relationships such as parent/child and teacher/student (Levinson et al., 1962: 69; Kakar, 1971). To this end, the expectations and behaviors exhibited in the...
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