Homo Faber: children’s making practices and 4A agency

Drawing on research from our Development Education in the Vernacular of children and Infants in West Africa (DEVI), this paper describes how young children in craft and farming communities in West Africa play at making and how this making involves the repeated copying of tasks they see, feel and hear around them. We use the concept of mimesis to capture the ways that the material world (material culture but also ‘nature’) is worked on by young children as they copy and remake or innovate the activities of their parents and older children. It emphasizes the repetitious character of young children’s activities of making, moving, bricolage and how this repetition, which involves at the same time slippage from the original, produces new ways for the child to think about/experience the socio-cultural world and in doing so forms their own subjectivity as agential, participatory beings. We offer a typology of 4A (audience, assistant, apprentice, artisan) agency to explain how the mimetic activity of young children shapes their cognition and sense of agency. We use this schema to develop our argument that agency is not the property of individuals. It emerges in and through action. It is therefore always hybrid, enacted and participatory. Agency, in other words, is not a possession but an event.