Children’s aesthetic agency as manifested in everyday early childhood education contexts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58955/jecer.160761Keywords:
child's aesthetic agency, aesthetic primitives, elements of childhood aesthetics, early childhood educationAbstract
This article examines child´s aesthetic agency in various situations in the everyday life of institutional early childhood education. The study is grounded in a naturalistic view of the human being as inherently aesthetic, and aesthetic agency is analyzed both through Dissanayake’s (1995, 2013, 2015) five aesthetic primitives and from the perspective of the elements of childhood aesthetics (von Bonsdorff, 2018). The findings show that the children´s aesthetic agency emerges in everyday life whenever even a small opportunity arises. It is also strongly narrative in nature: children’s actions are storytelling practices that unfold as embodied, linguistic, and interactional expression (von Bonsdorff, 2018, p. 126–138). Aesthetic agency is realized intersubjectively – as reaching out to others – as children respond to one another’s gestures, movements, and sounds, continuing and reshaping the expressions initiated by others. This creates a dynamic and ever-evolving space of shared aesthetic agency, a socio-aesthetic agency (Rissanen, 2025, pp. 74–76), in which individual experience and shared aesthetic attunement become intertwined. Children’s aesthetic agency flourishes particularly in the context of self-directed play. The research data was collected from a group of five-year-old children (N = 7) and consists of video recordings, the researcher's observation notes, and a field diary.
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