Stimulating children's agency and positioning as subjects through aesthetic experiences in early years classrooms

Abstract

This qualitative case study investigates how a series of aesthetic interventions on philosophically complex themes, such as death and fear as life experiences, offered to first graders at a multicultural urban school in Norway, stimulate their agency and positioning as subjects. Drawing on video-recorded observations and artefacts produced by the children during the project, we show that their responses were enacted in multiple ways. This included nonverbal mirroring of the adults’ actions with and without further interactional extensions but also responses beyond mirroring where the children drew on multiple semiotic resources such as dialogue, writing, drawn images, and the body, to share their experiences with others. We argue that the interventions can be seen as platforms for both individual and communal enactments of the children's agency through joint, multimodal explorations of complex concepts and what it means for the children to be subject in the world.