Cultural agents creating texts: a collaborative space adventure

This paper discusses the ways in which young children collaboratively use narrative play and the available space and materials around them in order to exert cultural agency. The collaborative creation of texts is asserted as central to this expression of agency. By presenting an illustrative vignette of a group of 5-year-old boys as they engage in literacy practices and create a range of meaningful texts within an early years compulsory education setting, the ways in which agency is expressed through the collaborative venture of text creation is explored. The vignette follows an episode of self-initiated dramatic play, fuelled by the children's desire to engage in peer culture and make meanings collaboratively. This play episode spurs the creation of a range of hybridised texts, which culminate in the production of a written narrative. Observations from this study are then used to add to a broader discussion, which raises concerns about the current policy in England, which views early writing development as a set of individual and predefined set of skills to be acquired, a view which could undervalue the experiences that children bring to early educational settings