Going beyond children´s a priory agency - a practice-theoretical approach

Both childhood studies and early childhood education share the same dilemma in reconceptualising children’s agency, set up between viewing it as an a priori factum or as a variable, emerging and also fractal capacity of children. This paper considers what so called post-structural practice theories might offer to conceptualize children’s agency by viewing it primarily as a feature of practices. I show how such an approach can be made productive for research on young children in ECEC through ethnographic case studies on children’s everyday-day-care lives and discuss this theorization’s potentials and limitations for child-centred practices in ECEC.