A Culture of Agency: Fostering Engagement, Empowerment, Identity, and Belonging in the Early Years

Deeply engage all young learners with a sense of agency and belonging

What gives some early childhood classrooms that special buzz of learning? How do those educators create the culture of learning for their students, where all children are deeply involved and drive their own learning with curiosity and care? Using her everyday research approach, in the tradition of the pedagogistas of Reggio Emilia, author Lisa Burman observed several special classrooms with children ages three to eight and identified some common threads: engagement, agency, identity, and belonging, which together combine to create a culture of agency. The term agency is widely used, but often misunderstood as giving children choice. Agency is far more than this, and the most powerful learning happens when personal agency is connected to community agency: we are only as strong as each other. These connections form the heart of a democratic education: one that values the rights of the child and empowers participation, shared power, respect for diversity, and self-efficacy.

Her framework for supporting a culture of agency has five pillars: Relationships, Rituals for belonging and identity, Language of agency, Environment, and Learning Contexts. Using this framework along with the book’s guiding questions and goal-setting tool will help you bring intentionality as you build your classroom culture to support children’s agency and learning.