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This paper outlines a dialectical conceptualization of children's agency for the purposes of multidisciplinary educational theory and practice. We will illuminate the following five contradictory but connected dimensions of children's agency, or the dialectics of agency, identified from recent theoretical debates: Agency as (1) enacted and imagined; (2) as situatively emergent and progressively developmental; (3) as dependence and separation; (4) as mastery and submission; and (5) as control and freedom. We examine and discuss these contradictions "at work" in an ethnographic early education case study. Our argument is that the children's struggles towards agency and adults' efforts and failures to support children in their struggles, can be conceptualized as a dialectical movement between the opposing poles of these contradictions. Our dialectical reading of both data and theory has helped us to highlight the challenges the practitioners face when supporting children's agency and the solutions they implement when doing so.

Many pedagogic interventions aim to counteract the problem of students' disengagement in learning but often fail to take into account the perceptions and practices of educational practitioners. In this article we analyse teachers' collaborative talk as an important part of developing school practices. We examine how teachers construct students' engagement as a goal of their work and how they, in the course of a research-based, school-led pedagogic intervention, begin to redefine this problem and their perceptions of their students. Using a discourse analytic framework, we analyse nine video-recorded group discussions with 30 teachers in a socially disadvantaged urban secondary school participating in a 2-year intervention study. The analysis focuses on teachers' talk of their students as the teachers constructed obstacles, preconditions and possibilities for the development of their work. We categorize the teachers' talk about their students' engagement as emphasising (1) Students as autonomous choice-makers; (2) Students as active doers and participants in school; and (3) Students as whole, embodied beings. During the intervention, teachers' talk shifted not only from negative to more positive talk of their students but also to seeing their students as more complex and embodied beings whose problems in school are not inevitable obstacles for classroom work but as something that the teachers can start to do something at. In this paper we call this change in teachers' talk as "envisioned ideology". In pedagogic interventions there need to be what we call "latent supporting factors" that can enable the development of this kind of "envisioned ideology".

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