Connections between Music Education and Childhood Studies: Searching for Children’s Agency

This paper aims to discuss concepts of children's agency in music education by integrating perspectives within the sociology of childhood. Recent discussions highlight children as potential catalysts for change in fields like education and politics (Wheeler, 2023), in a perspective that impacts and transforms children's daily experiences globally, transcending academic boundaries (James, 2009). However, a significant gap persists between the theoretical acknowledgment of children's agency potential (Young, 2006; Karlsen, 2011; Young and Wu, 2019) and the provision of tangible opportunities for skill development, a critical concern underscored by James and Prout (2005). Children's agency encompasses the ability to make decisions, express preferences, and actively shape their surroundings (Karlsen, 2019). Viewing children as social agents entails recognizing them as active contributors to shaping their existence, emphasizing the inherent value of their lives for research, and extending beyond insights into the future of human development (James, 2009). An Early Childhood Music Education perspective provides a distinctive context for exploring agency, as its conventional definition of agency often ties closely to specific content conveyed by educators, resulting in a vertical teaching approach where agency predominantly flows from teacher to student. In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of children's agency within the realm of music education; one that is situated at the intersection with childhood studies. Our main goal is to prompt reflection, and transform these concepts into new and more comprehensive meanings. Adopting a more horizontal approach, we sustain that music education may become a space where agency is not confined to unidirectional knowledge transmission but is co-constructed through interactions among children, musical content, and teacher guidance. This fluid and participatory dynamic offers an enriching perspective for analyzing children's agency in an educational context.