Observed Children at Play: Complex Relations of Agency in a 1930s' Kindergarten

Abstract

Abstract:In this article, we juxtapose Norman Fairclough's (1992) critical discourse analysis with the history of childhood to analyze children's and adults' agency in a Swedish kindergarten during the 1930s. We use a primary source on child observation to study the role of initiatives—i.e., actions—in a situation where children were playing kindergarten. We are chiefly interested in the new insights that we can gain about children's and adults' agency when studying initiatives as a form of agency involving compliance (Gleason 2016). The article shows that compliance with a situation could be part of how a child could contribute to, and build, a shared preschool identity formed by an interdependence that included both children and adults. The focus is not on whether a child could play an agentic role in relation to adults, but rather on how the collective decision making involving children and adults was affected by their respective capacities to contribute. In addition to analyzing social interactions, we suggest that similar sources—i.e., historical child observations—could be used for transnational investigations of children's and adults' everyday lives in early childhood institutions in creative ways.