Makers: How Children Learn Agency

This book is about how children become competent people who understand and can act on and even transform the world. Its novel framework of 4A agency shows how children participate in making as audience, assistant, apprentice and artisan in makerspaces and in make-believe, music-making and toy-making. The book explains why it is important that children are provided with opportunities for self-directed making. It substantiates many of the claims of 4E cognition, that action precedes and is the ground for thought. It provides a new theoretical framework of 4A agency 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. Makers: How Children Learn Agency is relevant to childhood studies, sociologists of education, and 4E cognition theorists. It will also be of interest to makers and anyone interested in children’s agency and makerspaces.