Communal Agency and Social Development: Examples from First Grade Classrooms Serving Children of Immigrants

Communal Agency and Social Development: Examples from First Grade Classrooms Serving Children of Immigrants

This article explores how children of Latino immigrants responded to a learning environment where they could influence how and what they learned. Using ethnographic data from the much larger Agency and Young Children project in the United States, this article describes how a particular six year old classroom serving mostly children of Latino immigrants responded in ways that not only increased content knowledge in subjects such as science and literacy but also increased the amount of shared or communal agency in the classroom, even affecting the development of social capabilities by the children and teacher alike. Using a conceptual framework borrowed from development economics and particularly the work on agency and capabilities by Sen (1999; 2003), this paper counters a strictly psychological, individualistic version of agency and instead conceptualizes agency as a means to building individual and communal capabilities.