Collaboration and Connection

Juvenilia scholarship typically privileges a lone child author writing without adult intervention. This essay explores questions about intergenerational authorship and juvenilia through a focus on Homes: A Refugee Story, a work of “creative non-fiction” produced through the collaboration of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and his former teacher Winnie Yeung. Homes chronicles the experience of al Rabeeah in Syria prior to his emigration with his family to Canada as a young teen. The essay authors draw on a joint interview they conducted with al Rabeeah and Yeung, who characterized their mode of collaborating as one between the young “storyteller” and adult “writer,” and discussed how they negotiated their roles in light of questions regarding agency, privacy, ethics, and trauma. The essay concludes by suggesting that fluid definitions of child writing and child agency may be particularly important when it comes to trauma narratives.

The Ethiopian ”family collective” and child agency

Any discussion of the “family collective” and the place of children within it requires an understanding of what constitutes a family and what a child is. Since ”family”, “child” and “agency” are all value-laden notions full of meanings, and vary cross-culturally, they need to be unpacked, and this is one of the things I will be doing throughout this lecture. What is a family? Is there one ideal Ethiopian family collective? Who is the ageless, genderless and culture-neutral “child”? Also, how is the agency of children in the plural differentiated, intersected and dissected by religion, ethnicity, stage of childhood, and social maturity, as well as rural and urban locations? To what extent are the actions of children constrained or enhanced by the family collective and vice versa? Clearly, these are very broad and complex questions, and while I do not attempt to answer them all, I try to approach them from the perspective of my own discipline of geography, largely focusing on rural-urban contrasts, differences and linkages. In so doing, I underline some overlaps, contradictions and peculiarities in the ways in which children exercise agency within families by drawing on (and sometimes inferring from) the limited sociological and anthropological literature on the issue (Hammond 2004, Poluha 2004, 2008, Hamer 1987, Hamer & Hamer 1994), as well as my own research (Abebe 2008). My lecture is organized along the following lines. I begin with problematizing the Ethiopian family collective and present a discussion of families and households, and their diverse structures, forms and functions. Second, I explore the concept of childhood, focusing on how notable lifecycle events, such as birth, name-giving, circumcision, and christening, are infused with notions of agency, particularly ones related to symbolic agency. Finally, I discuss how children experience authority while growing up, and exercise agency to varying degrees and in contexts in which they find themselves. I wish to emphasize from the outset that this attempt is only descriptive and although I give examples whenever possible, this is at the risk of making generalizations about the otherwise ethnically and culturally diverse country of Ethiopia, which, demographically speaking, is also the second most populous nation in sub-Saharan Africa.

From Birth to Three: Exploring Educators’ Understandings of Agency

The Early Years Learning Framework promotes the need to recognise children’s participation rights and for educators to be responsive to and promote child agency. This study explored how infant and toddler educators understand agency, and what role they ascribe to themselves in infants’ and toddlers’ realisation of agency. Research was undertaken in early childhood settings in Brisbane, Australia. Interviews and reflection activities were conducted with 15 educators working with children under three years, and responses coded through thematic analysis. Participants provided some working definitions of agency and examples of supporting children’s agency in their everyday practices. However, responses largely revealed confusion and limited understandings of agency. Through engaging a critical feminist paradigm, a connection between the status provided to infant–toddler educators, and the impact upon their knowledge and practice is proposed, and recommendations put forward for increased opportunities relating to birth to three pedagogy.

School, Languages and Power in Pretend Play of Romani Children

This text explores different language ideologies and different ideologies of childhood and socialization among Romani parents and local teachers of Romani children. It also makes some notes on different modes of learning that the children can come across both inside and outside the school environment. All these features can be linked with the child-structured pretend play with school instruction as the main topic, as I observed it during my stays in one segregated Romani settlement in Eastern Slovakia. Among other functions, this play creates a natural niche of using Slovak, a language of instruction and the second language of children in Gav, which is not used in home environment of the children. I will show that, despite the teachers seeing the Romani settlement as a non-stimulating environment, the children learn many things in many different patterns. Nevertheless, the text presents the settlement and the school not as two different worlds, but as places naturally linked together through child agency.