Abstract
The notion of agency is being used with increasing frequency in early childhood policies, replacing traditional assumptions about young children’s immaturity and their role as mere recipients of adults’ arrangements. Agency is thus both an educational aspiration as well as a signifier of a strong rights-based political commitment to countering views of children as immature and incompetent. This article develops the argument that agency is inherently a sociocultural product that is driven by children’s clear attempts to bond with others and to develop a sense of belonging. Using examples of the everyday experiences of two Chinese immigrant children in an early childhood centre, the article considers ways in which agency was exercised by the children in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting because they wanted to belong. Some crucial issues are highlighted for practice and policy development in the area of immigrant children’s education, arguing that the shaping of early childhood education requires an attention to children’s ‘invisible’ capabilities, needs to belong and ‘small’ everyday life realities.
Introduction
In many early childhood settings across the world, immigrant children’s voices rarely guide early childhood programmes or influences policies. Despite the widespread advocacy for children’s agency in early childhood settings, the assumption that immigrant young children have difficulties communicating in the dominant language leads to perceptions that they are not competent enough to be agentic. Research studies increasingly inform us of tokenistic or marginalizing practices in multicultural early childhood settings (Guo, 2014; Rivalland and Nuttall, 2010). They reveal the difficulties faced by immigrant children to gain access to non-immigrant peer groups (De Feyter and Winsler, 2009) and to participate in other routine activities in early childhood settings which are neither designed for them nor by them (Barron, 2009). Barron’s ethnographic study of a group of children starting nursery school in the North of England showed how taken-for-granted practices in the nursery school were discontinuous with the home experiences of some immigrant children and acted to exclude them from mainstream activities. For example, unfamiliarity with the British practice of queuing, and lack of the necessary language skills, meant that some immigrant children unwittingly disrupted a shop role-play activity leading to their participation being seen as ‘illegitimate’ (p. 346) and inept.
Within the broad early childhood field, the growing policy aspiration to develop young children’s agency, strongly influenced by the Children’s Rights movement with its focus on children’s rights to participate (e.g. Te One and Dalli, 2010), is not always easy to translate into pedagogical action. As Ghirotto and Mazzoni (2013) noted, the adults’ power to educate and care can be used to empower or disempower children’s agency. Additionally, while the meaning of agency is often taken as a given in early childhood conversations, there are still questions about its exact definition and what is meant by ‘agency’ in specific early childhood contexts. For example, Lee et al. (2013) conceived agency in a contextual way, saying ‘children are positioned with, or construct, agency in particular contexts’ (p. 78). However, many others (e.g. Dunlop, 2003; Turunen and Perry, 2013; Van Nijnatten, 2010) assert that agency refers to children’s evolving capacity to act and construct their own life, thus framing agency as an aspect of learning. Nsamenang (2008) on the other hand argued that agency is ‘a natural disposition in children to be active and participative’ (p. 211).
Viewed from these perspectives, agency can be seen as a discourse which contributes not only to the construction of our images of children and our understanding of their identities and the choices they make in everyday life but also to the construction and constitution of children as social beings. Agency, as a discourse, therefore unfolds the dynamics of the bonds between children, their self and others and the sociocultural practices around them. In other words, children’s agentic actions, such as making decisions of what to play, with whom and where, are embedded in situations where their desires and needs are influenced by their learning resources, including the spaces and people around them. In this way, the ‘self’ dimension of agency can be seen as tied to the sociocultural environment of the child which may require them to look beyond simple interest or need to the aspects of identity and social being, and to the degree of control their actions can have over their world. In Nsamenang’s (2008) words, Agency propels developmental outcomes, especially self-identity, which is an agentic core of personality by which humans learn to increasingly differentiate and master themselves and the world. It gives meaning and purpose to life and perspective to human efforts. Through it, individuals come to situate themselves, for instance, as belonging to a distinct ‘race’, place, ethnicity, nationality, gender, or culture. (p. 6)
This statement captures not only the sense that agency is an internally driven and naturally arising power or impetus to have an effect on the outside world but also that agency is implicated in the accomplishment of a sense of self as well as in the establishment of a sense of belonging with others (as part of a race/nationality/gender/culture), in a process that is more mutually constitutive than it is linear. For the purpose of our research, we saw agency as a phenomenon of children’s autonomy and capacity to learn; this is consistent with our view of children as active and capable constructors of their contexts.
The concept of belonging is central to the study of early childhood education. Belonging is a key social competence (Ghirotto and Mazzoni, 2013), and ensuring that children feel a sense of belonging in their early childhood setting is a worldwide curricular goal: for example, it is one of the learning strands of Te Whāriki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum and the first word in the title of the Australian Early Childhood curriculum document: Belonging, Being, and Becoming. It is used to describe a social bonding, togetherness, and a sense of attachment to others (Mortlock, 2014). Research on belonging has been conducted in a range of early childhood settings with toddlers (Mortlock, 2014), with young children (Nutbrown and Clough, 2009), or with those in refugee camps (Hart, 2000). Research insights into how immigrant children might experience a sense of belonging in early childhood setting, however, are rare.
One major contribution to studies on immigrants’ sense of belonging comes from Probyn (2001) who used the notion of skin to metaphorically warn about the danger of trying to understand immigrants from the things seen only from the outside. According to Probyn, ‘skin offers a myriad of connections, but it also reminds us of the limits of good intentions’ (p. 88). Probyn argued that ‘belonging’ is not constructed in a straightforward way but by the constant interplay between particular specificities, such as gender or race, and the unfamiliar dynamics of events in everyday life such as an incidental interaction between strangers. For her, these specificities and events open up a myriad of possibilities and directions and generate various forms of belonging which cannot be easily seen or understood (Van Staveren, 1998).
Given these complexities, and how little is known about immigrant children’s needs and choices in educational settings, the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘belonging’, as they apply to this group of children in early childhood settings, require further investigation. For those working with immigrant children in early childhood settings, ongoing critiques of traditional early-years pedagogy as being rooted in Western ‘white’ approaches (Barron, 2009; Fleer, 2003) that may not be appropriate in all contexts (e.g. Ailwood, 2003; Burman, 2008; Cannella and Viruru, 2004) provide another strong argument to critically reconsider taken-for-granted meanings of these terms. Specifically, multicultural education scholars argue that no single pedagogy works for all children, given differences in children’s backgrounds, needs, capabilities and interests (Boyer, 2013; Rivalland and Nuttall, 2010). Hence, teachers are encouraged to make pedagogical decisions that fit children’s particular characteristics, rather than some generic ideal. For example, where a child’s ways of doing things deviate from those of the mainstream or of typically developing peers, the child should still be seen as capable rather than as in need of re-shaping. Collectively, these arguments point to the need to investigate agency in the everyday lives of immigrant children in early childhood settings in order to better inform early-years pedagogy.
Investigating agency and belonging in immigrant children’s everyday life in an early childhood setting
Lefebvre (2002) has argued that everyday life should be raised as a question to be explored and critiqued. Everyday life provides a way to make sense of the experiences and realities of people, a first step in understanding the complexities of living. For him, everyday life is the meeting point of many distinct systems, and it is a window through which the relationship between people and their environments is completely displayed (Elden et al., 2006).
What is perhaps of central importance in Lefebvre’s concept of everydayness is the requirement to remain critical of ‘a worldwide tendency to uniformity’ (Lefebvre and Levich, 1987: 7). Lefebvre argued for a conception of everydayness in which repetition and change are interconnected. He stated, ‘everyday has always been repetitive’, ‘everyday illuminates the past’ and ‘everything changes’ (p. 10). For Lefebvre (2002), the key significance of everydayness in research can be seen in the analysis of two modes of repetition: the repetition of natural rhythms such as day and night, and rational repetition. The rational mode is the one that generates changes because it is about purposeful repetitions that over time create their own change: The days follow one after another and resemble one another and yet – here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness – everything changes. But the change is programmed: obsolescence is planned. Production anticipates reproduction; production produces change in such a way as to superimpose the impression of speed onto that of monotony. (p. 10)
Lefebvre embraced the rational mode of everyday life as constituting a platform upon which reasons and choices of people are revealed (Elden et al., 2006). In this article, we borrow this notion of everyday life being a platform as a way of opening up our understanding of the experiences of two immigrant children in one early childhood setting. To date, studies of immigrant children in early childhood settings have examined the relations between immigrant children and the routines and activities on offer in their preschool settings (Castro, 2014; Che Mustafa, 2014; Soto and Garza, 2011). By applying Lefebvre’s concept of everydayness, children’s participation in everyday routines and activities can be seen as rational repetitions of experiences that children choose to undertake and repeat, thus (potentially) producing change. We focus on these rational repetitions and what these can reveal about children’s learning, including learning about belonging and agency.
In addressing this task, our study explored the natural, contextual and evolving ways in which two immigrant children in one New Zealand early childhood centre were observed to exercise agency in their everyday life as they created their identities, and explored new ways of being that lay beyond their original state when they started childcare.
New Zealand’s multicultural early childhood education: A site for political practice
The current multicultural nature of early childhood education in New Zealand exemplifies the general situation in New Zealand society. Increasingly ethnically diverse, New Zealand has a total population of 4.5 million with 15% identifying as indigenous Māori. The largest ethnic group is of European origin (74%). The Asian population is the fastest growing ethnic group (12%) with Indian figures higher than Chinese. People from the Pacific Islands make up 7% of the total population, while people of Middle Eastern, Latin American and African origin make up a further 1% (Statistics New Zealand, 2013).
In this multicultural context, the topics of ‘cultural diversity’ ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ have burgeoned into a major educational interest in recent years, and Te Whāriki, the early childhood curriculum framework in New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 1996), clearly states that: The early childhood curriculum supports the cultural identity of all children, affirms and celebrates cultural differences, and aims to help children gain a positive awareness of their own and other cultures. (p. 18)
In the late 1990s, Stephen May (2003), an influential New Zealand scholar, proposed the adoption of the concept of ‘critical multiculturalism’ which problematizes the effects of power imbalance on cultural relationships. Critical multiculturalism has shifted the focus of traditional multicultural discourses, which attempt to make different cultures live together ‘harmoniously’, towards revealing how minority cultures can be emancipated from unjust treatments so that the apparent harmonious multicultural structure is not the result of the marginalization of minority cultures. Rooted in critical theory, the notion of critical multiculturalism acknowledges that cultural relationships within multicultural societies are asymmetrical; critical multiculturalism shifts the perspective on the nature of education from seeing it as only serving children’s learning to viewing it as a more complex and problematic institution. In the process, critical multiculturalism reconstructs education as a social agent able to challenge the social structures that produce inequities.
Attempts to challenge cultural biases in education have a long ancestry in New Zealand. The Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of the country, was signed in 1840 as a bicultural partnership agreement between Pākehā, or new arrivals, and Māori, the pre-existing settlers in New Zealand. However, triggered by land deals, Pākehā disregarded the agreement and became the colonizer and the dominant power in all aspects of New Zealand society (Rau and Ritchie, 2011). As is the case with many colonized communities, such a deprivation of cultural rights was not passively accepted by Māori, who made numerous attempts to challenge the legislated and institutionalized sociocultural inequalities (Rau and Ritchie, 2011). As a result, in the last few decades, the Treaty of Waitangi has regained its importance and the bicultural movement has become a strong commitment in New Zealand. This bicultural context has a significant effect on all aspects of social and cultural life, including early childhood education, and serves not only to foreground the importance of the indigenous Māori culture but also other minority cultures.
Nonetheless, despite these movements, contemporary education in New Zealand, including early childhood care and education, continues to reflect ‘white knowledge and practices’ and how they may best be affirmed (Glynn, 2013). Ritchie (2003) has suggested that one reason is that the majority of early childhood teachers are of Pākehā background: ‘Pākehā educators, as representative of the dominant culture, are able to exercise power because their discourses have become institutionalised as normal, right, and desirable, thus privileging these people and silencing and marginalizing alternative discourses’ (p. 3). Another reason is globalization which Banerjee and Linstead (2001) described as a strong force to re-drive and re-expand the diffusion of Western culture and present it as the most useful source of learning. Kassimeris and Vryonides (2012) have additionally pointed out that globalization enables the practice of Western power because of its focus on wealth, economic development and global competition.
Li et al. (2010) have suggested that in many preschool settings, multicultural situations are handled in a very tokenistic way and result in children and families of minority cultures having limited access to their own cultural values. Instead, they are ‘governed’ through the rules of a White society. Additionally, in their study with Asian American children, Yamamoto and Li (2012) reported that teachers commonly perceived these children as ‘shy, quiet or silent’ (p. 1). By contrast, in New Zealand, Glynn (2013) has reported that children of Māori and Pacific cultures are often assumed to be ‘problematic’ and ‘undisciplined’, resulting in what Glynn has called a ‘mainstream perpetuation of deficient thinking about Māori students’ behaviour and achievement’ (p. 46). The creation of these images shows how children of minority cultures can be positioned as unequal with their Pākehā peers and, for one reason or another, categorized as ill-equipped to help with decision-making. Thus, watchwords in education such as ‘anti-bias’, ‘anti-discrimination’, ‘celebrating diversity’ and ‘democratic community’ often end up deployed as slogans to describe the desired state of affairs in education rather than as reliable indicators of a socially equal and just ethic. Recognizing this disjuncture, following Black and Huygens (2007), Glynn (2013) has suggested that ‘colour blind’ may be the more accurate descriptor for New Zealand society. In other words, Pākehā culture is so powerful that it: occupies almost all of the psychological space available for people from all cultural groups who live in Aotearao/New Zealand, and has come to represent for many Pākehā, all that needs to be understood as ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’, and ‘expected’ of typical New Zealanders. Black and Huygens suggest that this positioning can render Pākehā, ‘colour blind’, resulting in our believing that our Pākehā cultural identity is the neutral or default position, against which the identities and positions of all other cultural groups are then interpreted as ‘different’ (often meaning deficient) or ‘other’ (often meaning inferior). (p. 39)
Glynn sees this colour-blind attitude as allowing the maintenance of Pākehā values even in the face of a growing diversity of cultural styles and structures. This raises the question of how cultural minority children in contemporary New Zealand early childhood settings manage to negotiate their cultural identity in a setting in which they are striving to belong. By focusing specifically on how two Chinese immigrant young children participated in the ‘everydayness’ of life in their first early childhood centre in New Zealand, our study contributes to opening up this question and its implications for pedagogy and political practice.
The current study
The data used in this article were collected as part of a multiple case study which investigated the experiences of 10 Chinese immigrant children as they started attending their first early childhood centres in New Zealand (Guo, 2010). This article focuses on the experiences of two of the children, a girl and a boy, Xiaohan and Rick, both aged around 4 years and 5 months at the start of the study. We analyse the children’s actions in the everyday context of their early childhood centre as they took part in the everyday life of their environment – with all its repetitive, cultural and changeable aspects – and sought to establish their place within it.
Both children were born in China. Rick immigrated to New Zealand when he was 2, and Xiaohan arrived when she was 4 years and 3 months. At the time of the study, Rick had been in the centre for 2 years while Xiaohan had been attending for a month. They both spoke fluent Chinese with Rick communicating in English quite well and Xiaohan speaking very little English. There were also other Chinese-speaking children in the centre during the time of the study, but the majority of children spoke English and English was the only language used by the teachers.
Access to the everyday life of each child was sought through a 5-day extensive observation of the child. This involved continuous pen and paper records of everything that the child was doing, and the analysis of formal and informal conversations with the child about major routine activities.
The analysis in this article is underpinned by the ideas of Lefebvre (2002) and specifically the ‘everyday critique’ framework, where the repetitive and changeable aspects of children’s everyday life are explored and reflected on. Taking the view that children repeat their actions for a reason, we focus upon the children’s learning in their centre as constituting patterns of experiences. We also highlight how the themes in the children’s everyday lives connect up with discourses about immigrant children’s identities, abilities, ways of communication, and about the notion of ‘belonging’. This illustrates how the children’s everyday lives were also, in Probyn’s (1996) words, the result of children’s arrangement of the interplay between their cultural minority specificities and their desire for a sense of belonging within their early childhood setting.
In practice, we studied the data through iterative and inductive analysis, generating categories and codes from the observations and conversations with each child. We began with a close reading of the data corpus and carried on with recursive analysis, looking for patterns and repetitions of children’s actions and words, paying particular attention to the ways in which they made choices and decisions. Based on this analysis, we formulated three empirical themes which are discussed in the following section.
Study findings
In the two children’s everyday situations, living in the early childhood centre could be characterized as involving repeated events and patterns of experiences. Many of these events and experiences were initiated or framed by the children themselves. Xiaohan and Rick made choices and sought to exercise control over the happenings in their centre. Three main themes ran through the observational data of the children’s everyday experiences: ‘adapting to the centre’, ‘seeking out English learning opportunities’ and ‘applying home cultural practices’. As we identified these three themes, it also became clear that both children acted with a strong sense of agency that seemed motivated by their desire and abilities to bond with peers and build togetherness. The children’s agency was also affected by a constant interplay between their particular specificities, especially elements from their home culture such as the Chinese language, and the sociocultural dynamics within the centre. The study shows that everyday events and patterns of interactions gave rise to opportunities through which the children opened up their identities, explored useful ways of being and satisfied their desire for belongingness.
Adapting to the centre
The children appeared to be actively adapting themselves to the everyday life of the centre through participating in any learning activities and socializing with their peers. One force seemed to drive their process of adaptation and their determination to fit in their centre environment: the children’s recognition of the importance of attending the centre, evident in Xiaohan’s statement ‘I’m big enough to attend school’ and Rick’s point ‘Mum has my little brother to look after. I must be here’.
Xiaohan, especially, began early childhood education in New Zealand with limited knowledge and understanding of the everyday life in the new setting. She knew almost no English but, similarly to Rick and her other peers, Xiaohan appeared aware of the naturally repetitive features of the everyday life of the early childhood centre and closely followed the routine activities. The data contained numerous examples of the two children involved in many kinds of learning activities that recurred throughout the days, and there was no evidence that the children had a particular dislike of any of the experiences.
The two children also adopted a variety of skills to socialize with peers because as Rick said, ‘I want to know and play with many friends in the centre’. Their attempts to fit in with the social dynamics of their everyday life included the application of negotiation skills and making compromises. Both these strategies became clear themes in the two children’s peer relationships. The repetitive display of this peer-interaction pattern provides an example of the children’s rational repetition that led to changes in their social status and roles in the centre. When asked how she played with peers, Xiaohan said, ‘sometimes I need to listen to them, or they don’t play with me’. This reply demonstrated Xiaohan’s awareness of the importance of adjusting her own interests to those of her peers. Behind this was her need for social bonding and attaining a position within the peer group. Xiaohan’s statement also denotes the dynamic relation of the child to her everyday context, and the child’s own initiative to change.
We noted many examples of Xiaohan negotiating and reaching compromises in order to adapt herself to the peer group, as in the following interaction between her and Rick:
Xiaohan is building a structure with blocks. Rick walks up to her to watch.
‘gei wo yi gel an se de’ [give me a blue one], pointing to the pile of blocks.
Rick finds a blue one and gives it to Xiaohan.
‘wo yao yi ge da de’ [I need a big one].
‘zhao bu dao’ [I cannot find it], ‘ni zi ji zhao ba’ [get it yourself] and leaves.
‘Rick, hui lai. Wo jiu yong ni de lai se de’ [Rick, come back. I use the blue one].
Rick walks back.
‘Rick, ni bang wo zhao yi ge huang de hao ma?’ [Rick, will you find me a yellow one?]
‘da de?’ [a big one?]
‘sui bian’ [up to you].
In this example, Rick appears to have taught Xiaohan that she would lose her friend if she was not ‘nice to him’. To keep Rick as her friend, Xiaohan changed the communication style from giving orders to negotiating and making compromises. Through the lens of everyday critique, what the children said and did is indebted to their needs for peer togetherness. This focus on their everyday life and the children’s desire to ‘be in the centre’ and ‘know and play with many friends’ illustrates that it was within situations of their daily lives that the children found the main clue about how to meet their needs for belonging. If we take the view that agency leads the accomplishment of a sense of self, it is possible to infer that the accomplishment of self is made possible through the development of complex knowledge about the relationships between the children themselves and others and about useful ways of being in the new learning context.
Seeking out English learning opportunities
Learning English was a strong feature of Xiaohan and Rick’s everyday experiences. On many occasions, the two children appeared to have purposefully sought out opportunities so that they could learn or communicate in the new language. Rick seemed immersed in developing his English language and he appeared to see the early childhood centre as the context for doing this. He participated in many interactions in English as illustrated in the following example:
Rick walks onto the edge of the sandpit. Rachel and Iris, two teachers, are talking in the sandpit. Two other children are playing around them.
‘my foot got hurt the other day’.
An English speaking child turns to Rachel: ‘Did you bleed?’
‘yes, I got a cut’.
Rick bends down and looks up into Rachel’s face and, watching her, asks: ‘did you cry?’
‘I cried because my feet hurt’.
‘it is okay to cry. I cry when I watch a sad movie’.
‘my brother cry. I don’t’.
Rick then picks up a stick and steps into the sandpit, drawing a round circle in the sand.
‘Rick, what are you drawing?’
‘a crying face’.
In this example, Rick entered an existing conversation and engaged himself in the context. Although the utterances he made were short, Rick took language turns naturally, appeared confident to talk, and endeavoured to follow the theme of the conversation. He not only used words but also added to the conversation with a drawing which our observation notes showed went on for the next 11 minutes. After drawing the circle, Rick drew tears on the face and told Rachel that his brother had tears on his face one day and he washed them off for him. Rick’s behaviours in this scenario show a clear sense of agency: he initiated his own involvement in an English-communication opportunity and demonstrated the capacity to engage with people. This is an example of a child sharing feelings with his teachers in a situation in which they had joint interest and engagement in conversations and play. Rick clearly felt comfortable and able to slot into the ongoing conversation seamlessly; his actions were those of someone who wanted to belong and to have interactions.
Learning English was also an important experience for Xiaohan. Unlike Rick, Xiaohan rarely spoke English because she knew very little English. Nonetheless, Xiaohan adopted strategies to aid her in communicating in English and was quick to identify and take up opportunities to learn and use it. For example, we saw Xiaohan making ‘an ice-cream’ out of sand, leaving the sandpit, going to a girl and handing her the ‘ice-cream’ with the phrase ‘for you’. Her data also included the practice of English with a younger, less experienced Chinese peer, Red: In the playroom, Xiaohan stands at the window and watches the outside. She sees Red and then walks out to her: ‘let’s go, Red’, she says, as she takes Red’s hand and leads her away.
Red was only 2 years old and knew no English. This incident occurred after Xiaohan had been called by her teacher in a similar manner to move to a group activity. Xiaohan might have picked up the phrase there and practised with Red, a younger playmate.
In this way, like Rick, Xiaohan demonstrated her recognition that English was an essential part of her life in the centre and that it was important that she spoke English as a way of learning it. The two children’s purposeful construction of English learning opportunities highlights their agentic actions to create appropriate communicative means and generate new repertoires of practice. It also indicates that the early childhood setting was a place where the idea of fixed identities and unitary selves could be challenged. The opportunities which the children sought out to learn English also provide evidence of the children’s agency in expanding their identities and exploring new ways of being.
Applying home cultural practices
Another major way in which the two children exercised their agency was through their participation in practices that marked them out as of Chinese identity. This was most clearly evident when they used their home language – Chinese – in interactions with Chinese-language-speaking peers. In particular, we noted that instances of the children’s enthusiastic engagement in group activities often occurred when they were interacting with Chinese peers and teachers through the use of Chinese. The following is one example of this enthusiastic style of peer interaction: Xiaohan arrived at the centre at 9:50am and immediately walked over to two of her Chinese peers who were playing in the sandpit. ‘guo lai kan wo you she me?’ (Come to see what I got) The peers walk out of the sandpit towards Xiaohan. Ben, one of peers, calls on the way to Xiaohan: ‘shi shen me ya?’ (What have you got?) Xiaohan takes the peers inside and shows them a pink stone. The children examine the stone before moving to the family corner together.
This example illustrates Xiaohan’s use of the Chinese language to initiate contact with peers, which led on to doing things together. The importance of using a meaningful language to develop togetherness with others has been noted also by Hännikäinen and Van Oers (1999). In our study, the children seemed to be very aware of the usefulness of Chinese to connect them with Chinese-speaking peers. During their interviews, they gave the following reasons for their use of Chinese with Chinese peers:
We are all Chinese children
I’m Chinese. They are Chinese.
These comments confirm that being together with other Chinese children served as an important driving force for the children to use Chinese; the children seemed to know that the Chinese language was a tool that could connect them with other Chinese speakers. At the heart of their use of the Chinese language with each other, therefore, is the children’s awareness of the usefulness of the Chinese language to create meaning for them and other Chinese speakers, to have their needs understood, to enable them to play together (Whitehead, 2007) and to create togetherness.
It should be noted also that these children not only recognized the effectiveness of the Chinese language to build togetherness with others who shared their identity as Chinese, but also understood the way this identity grouped them together in relation to others who were not Chinese. The study of minority children’s social bonding with peers of similar ethnic groups has now evolved to the point that it is acknowledged that familiarities and similarities make a substantial contribution to children’s social experiences in unfamiliar learning settings (Armstrong, 2004). In our study, we noted that for a cultural minority child like Xiaohan, who was new in the centre, the use of the Chinese language provided a means for social bonding with Chinese peers and helped her find ‘a distinctly human form of action’ (Wartofsky, 1979: 202) with which she was familiar.
Immigrant children’s agency and belonging
This research helped us understand how and why two Chinese immigrant children exercised agency in an English-speaking early childhood centre in New Zealand. A significant finding of the study was the children’s focus on gaining a sense of belonging in their early childhood centre. The drive to belong appeared to promote the children’s agency to learn about how to be and behave in their new cultural setting of the early childhood centre. The children exercised their agency in three key ways: they actively adapted to, and learned to, participate in the everyday patterns of their early childhood centre; they built togetherness with Chinese-speaking peers through their use of their shared Chinese language; and they created a new communicative medium through learning English.
In analysing the children’s everyday living in the English-speaking sociocultural setting of their early childhood centre, it was clear that this setting gave rise to many seemingly small but important realities with which the children became increasingly familiar. By considering the children’s participation within their setting through the lens of Lefebvre’s (2002) concept of everydayness, it is possible to see the children’s response to their realities as participation in repetitive patterns that resembled one another and eventually enabled them to anticipate reproductions of the patterns as well as possibilities for change. Lefebvre argued that the everyday is a platform upon which people’s reasons and choices are revealed. In our study, the children’s reasons and choices were the need to belong and to establish a sense of self in relation to others. We argue that the children’s agency was employed in the service of these reasons and choices, and shaped by the specificities and dynamics that operated within their sociocultural context.
In addition, it was apparent that the children held clear views about their own learning experiences and were able to articulate these views when prompted. In other words, the children’s own intentions and their consciousness of their actions were powerful sources of information for building an understanding of their agentic actions.
Throughout our inquiry into the children’s everyday lives, we identified dynamic bonds between the children, their self and others and their sociocultural resources for making decisions of what to do, with whom and where, and thus meet their own desires and needs. For example, the children used the resource of their shared Chinese language to create vital social bonds with each other and other Chinese peers in the centre, and this highlights the contributions of familiarities and similarities to a sense of belonging. According to Probyn (1996), a sense of belonging is established through the movement of, and between, ‘self’, ‘others’, ‘society’ and ‘culture’. For the children in this study, these specificities opened up possibilities and directions and generated distinctive forms of belonging related to needs, abilities, cultures and contexts. The children’s actions in many learning situations indicated that they connected self, others, learning setting and cultural community, and they drew on specific means to achieve these connections. In this way, they controlled the ways in which their actions had an effect on everyday situations as they situated themselves as belonging to the distinctive cultural community within their centre (Nsamenang, 2008). Their everyday life could thus be seen as an enabling platform that provided the means to the children’s reproduction of identity and social position and to their incorporation of past experiences into their learning in the early childhood centre.
Drawing on the evidence of this research, we would argue that the view that agency is a naturally arising impetus does not adequately account for the sophistication of this notion. The agency shown by the children in this study included actions that appeared motivated by a drive to establish and maintain a sense of belonging, and the desire to explore useful ways of being in their early childhood centre. The need for a sense of belonging was a particularly salient orientation in their actions, and seemed to be more potent when they interacted with Chinese peers. We would therefore argue that agency should be understood first and foremost in terms of needs – such as the need to belong – and only secondarily in terms of capacities. Furthermore, our analysis showed that the children’s agency took shape as a sociocultural product generated in interpersonal arrangements in which children made clear attempts to bond with others and establish a sense of belonging. Thus, ‘agency’ appeared to be intricately bound up with the accomplishment of a sense of self and with the establishment of a sense of belonging.
Implications for early childhood educational pedagogy and policy
In a globalized world, immigrant young children’s education has become increasingly significant to educationalists and policy makers alike. Through the analysis of the actions of two immigrant children in the everyday context of their early childhood centre, this article has drawn attention to the repetitive, cultural and changeable aspects of what they did and said as the children strove to establish a sense of belonging and to exercise agency in their new cultural setting. It has also highlighted that although the children’s everyday behaviours might appear usual and minor, their behaviours provide important clues about the children’s goals and intentions and how they used their cultural resources to achieve them. Thus, this study offers important insights into how immigrant children in early childhood settings may be better understood and supported to exercise agency confidently both at the pedagogical level as well as at the level of policy.
From a pedagogical perspective, an understanding of young immigrant children’s agentic actions allows early childhood professionals to appreciate the importance of children’s right to make choices about how they actuate their need to belong. ‘To belong’ was the driving force behind the two children’s agency. If we know that immigrant children are strategic in their learning, and that they desire to belong, our working direction with them becomes clearer.
As shown in this study, children’s agency can be understood as the phenomenon of children constructing social positions and meeting belonging needs through their own actions. Carried forward on this finding, as well as on the notion of ‘skin’ (Probyn, 2001) and that of Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life, is the idea that the shaping of early childhood education requires attention to what is behind immigrant children’s initiatives and the interplay between their particular cultural specificities and the everyday events in which they participate.
However, these findings do not mean that learning for immigrant children should be construed as being only about building a sense of belonging and settling into an early childhood centre. Clearly, it is also about reaching potentials and maximizing learning opportunities, and developing the ability to live life being comfortable within oneself (Turunen and Perry, 2013). The challenge is therefore for educational professionals to draw on immigrant children’s strategies and support their learning in ways that are meaningful to them.
Furthermore, the Chinese immigrant children’s strategies and actions described in this article challenge the image that they are ‘quiet’ and ‘easy’ and perhaps also ‘compliant’. The study has shown that in the many routine activities of everyday life in their early childhood centre, the two Chinese immigrant children actively utilized their agency to achieve goals that they valued.
The children’s efforts to negotiate their own cultural identity in a setting in which they were striving to belong also pose significant implications for political practice by teachers as well as policy makers. In an increasingly multicultural global environment, if early childhood education is to move ahead in encouraging immigrant children’s agency, then it is crucial that the identity and interests of minority cultures, and the factors likely to influence their agentic actions, are taken into account in formulating multicultural policy and practice.
The question of what constitutes multicultural practice is no longer a matter of debate. A commitment to diverse values, practices and voices is the key task, and the broadening of learning and teaching approaches are the strategies to achieve it. Teachers’ openness in teaching will also open up the relationship between teachers and parents of immigrant children, thus creating the possibility that early childhood settings are truly sites of political practice: spaces where all people have a voice, are able to make a valued contribution, and collectively contribute to decisions about learning and development.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.