Karen Wells: "Makers - how children learn agency"

drawing on research in West Africa as part of the British Academy funded Development and Education in the Vernacular (DEVI, with co-I Prof Erdmute Alber & Prof Peace Tetteh), this paper outlines the argument made in Professor Wells's latest book Makers: How children learn agency. Makers offers a new theoretical framework of 4A agency that claims that practices of making are critical to how children’s knowledge, skill and self-confidence are developed. It does this through the description and analysis of children’s making in different zones of agency: mimetic, ludic, collective and design agency, as well as the agency afforded by makerspaces and by the materials themselves. 4A agency refers to the dispositions towards events in which the child engages as audience, assistant, apprentice, and artisan. These dispositions or modalities are not intended to map onto developmental stages but rather to how the organisation of social relations and material culture enable different expressions and experiences of agential capacity. I argue that neither children nor adults possess agency; rather, they have agential capacities, developed over time, that cohere at specific times and spaces in what I call ‘agential events’. I claim that material culture plays a central role in the development of agential capacities. Specifically, sensory engagement with and manipulation of the material world enables the development of cognition and through that of agential capacity. Therefore, expanding and facilitating the scope for participation in the world of making and doing is of paramount importance for enabling children to develop agential capacities and a sense of themselves as competent, cognising subjects.