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.

Notions of agency in early literacy classrooms : assemblages and productive intersectionsAgency and its role in the early literacy classroom has long been a topic for debate. While sociocultural accounts often portray the child as a cultural agent who negotiates their own participation in classroom culture and literacy learning, more recent framings draw attention from the individual subject, instead seeing agency as dispersed across people and materials. In this article I draw on my experiences of following children as they followed their interests in an early literacy classroom, drawing on the concepts of assemblage and people yet to come, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza's common notion. I provide one illustrative account of moment-by-moment activity and suggest that in education settings it is useful to see activity as a direct and ongoing interplay of three dimensions: children's moving bodies; the classroom; and its materials. I propose that children's ongoing movements create possibilities for 'doing' and 'being' that flow across and between children. I argue that thinking with assemblage can draw attention to both the potentiality and the power dynamics inherent in the ongoing present and also counter preconceived notions of individual child agency and linear trajectories of literacy development, and the inequalities this these concepts can perpetuate within early education settings. Introduction: Observing the emergence of literacy and re-thinking the literate agentSociocultural accounts of literacy learning have provided invaluable insights into the intricate relationships between children's literacy practices and their cultural experiences. These accounts have often presented the child as an active agent in cultural production and have influenced thinking about the dynamic role the child plays in literacy activity in school settings (See for example, Dyson, 2008; Marsh, 2006;Rowe, 2008Rowe, , 2010 Author, 2014). Despite the richness of literacy studies that reveal the complexity of children's literacy practices, however, early literacy learning in schools in England is currently dominated by a print-focused approach (See for example, Ellis and Moss, 2014) that may divert attention from any alternative expression or way of being literate in Early Years settings . The 'acquisition' of 2 literacy is often presented as following a pre-determined pathway of progression, based on developmental trajectories and underscored by understandings of the agentic literate child (see also Lenz-Taguchi, 2010;Olsson, 2009). Educational goals and external pressures for higher educational standards based on print literacy 'competency' shape what is considered to be appropriate literacy pedagogy for young children and are manifest in the pedagogical practices that play out in early literacy classrooms. In this article, I propose thinking in more depth about children's encounters in Early Years classrooms by examining what takes place moment-to-moment. In order to do this, I draw on a short episode from a ye...

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For many young children in developed countries, family and community life is mediated by digital technology. Despite this, for early years educators, the process of integrating digital technologies into classroom practice raises a number of issues and tensions. In an attempt to gain insights from early years teachers, we draw from semistructured interview data from ten practising teachers which explored their perspectives on digital technologies within their personal and professional lives, and of children's use of digital technologies within and outside educational settings. Our analysis builds on previous work that suggests that teachers draw on multiple discourses related to conceptualisations of childhood when thinking about digital technology and young children. In this paper we contribute to these discussions, drawing specifically on examples from the data where teachers articulate their understandings of children's use of digital technology where this relates directly to children's literacy practices. We assert that narrow conceptualized notions of literacy, compounded by national imperatives to raise print literacy standards, add another layer of discursive complexity that comes to the fore when teachers are asked to provide a rationale for the promotion of digital literacies in early years classrooms. A broader framing of literacy therefore, is needed if the potential of digital technologies in the early years is to be realized.