Over the past decades, children and childhood had many different conceptualizations arguing their contribution and the agency they have in the word and in particular in the contemporary participatory culture. Children or childhood as beings and becomings are two different conflicting approaches affect the social attitude and beliefs toward children allowed activity and role in the physical and virtual societies. The becoming children debates define children as an “adult in making” who is waiting to become and grow to the capable adult that have the ability, fitness, or quality necessary to do or achieve tasks. In this context, children are vulnerable, immature, and dependent therefore, unable to have the full citizen status and rights and should serve as a reflection of the adult they will be in the future. In contrast, the being child debates argue children as full social actor who are capable and own their right to construct and perform as an integral member of the society. Therefore, children have the capacity and empowered to form social relationships and cultural activities that are equally treated to the adults.
Keeping the being and becoming notions in mind, a third conceptualization emerge that consider these discourses together not as conflicting discourses, but as ones that complement one another. Therefore, consider children as both being and becoming increases their agency as social member online and offline. This project is dedicated to support this combination notion integrating children as active social agent who should have well defined and known contribution in the knowledge constructions and cultural experience, therefore their agency increases and value in present and future. Thus, Being and Becoming reconceptualizing childhood and children of becoming adult based on their present being agent and contribution to their future adult and to the social and cultural work they interact currently with.
Being and Becoming time concepts interact and complement one another.
They overlap reflecting childhood developmental paradigm as ‘being’ child is linked
to the ‘becoming’ adult in shaping their future agency and life experience.
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Important part of life experience and one’s agency is created during childhood thus, becoming
knowledge and experiences influenced and shaped by childhood.
In other words, Childhood is a stage of life course that chronologically precedes adulthood
which make ageing process draw the social knowledge and experience.
*Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children, Childhood and Temporality. Children & Society, 22, 303–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x
*Huang, J. (2019). Being and Becoming: The Implications of Different Conceptualizations of Children and Childhood in Education. Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education, 10(1). Retrieved from https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/cjnse/article/view/61733
*Baader, M.,Esser, F., Betz, T., &Hungerland, B. (2016).Reconceptualising agency and childhood: New perspectives in childhood studies.London, England: Routledge.
*Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as ‘being and becomings’: Children, childhood and temporality. Children & Society, 22(4), 303-313\
*Boyden J, Ennew J. 1997. Children in Focus: A Manual for Participatory Research with Children. Radda Barnen: Stockholm.
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