Enacted agency as the strategic making of selves in plurilingual literacy events: Framing agency and children as contributors to their own and others' learning

Abstract

'This article is about the understanding of how children, using different conceptions of literacy as means to construct their social reality and their social roles in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, are enabled to enact agency in terms of their strategic making and remaking of selves. The research approach is informed by a sociocultural conception of literacy and draws on a conception of agency as multisourced, distributed and mediated through human interaction, mediational means and discourses. The author uses a microethnographic approach combining ethnomethodology and conversational analysis as well as discourse analysis to make visible how the children are reached by more or less distant meanings and conceptions of literacy conveyed and stabilised through the locally acting devices. The analysis also shows how material objects like written texts produced by children mediate the participants' agency in different ways, constraining or enabling it with respect to how the children contribute to their own and to others' learning. The article ends with conclusions on perspectives for organising learning with regard to subject formation in terms of empowering participation designs and for designing analytic frames for investigating processes of formation of multisourced agency.