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This article develops an emergentist theory of children's agency. To make this claim, it first identifies the following two predicaments that scholars have faced in children's agency research: (1) social ambiguity in distinguishing children's learning from adults' guidance; and (2) causal uncertainty between children's cognitive development and the affordance of their social contexts. Then, this article discusses "tedate," a type of instructional scaffolding that uses these predicaments to foster agency in classrooms. It explains "tedate" through a two-step process: (1) situating students as liminal beings who use everyday objects as a heuristic for solving problems and a pivot to enter imaginary worlds; and (2) developing students' reflexivity by helping them articulate everyday objects as signs of their literacy. In doing so, this article puts forth an emergentist theory that argues "tedate" helps children develop their capacity for agency by introducing everyday objects in subject lessons that build their reflexivity and literacies.

This article studies the discussions that took place at a lifelong learning course in Yokohama city, Japan, on the topic of tōjisha, or subjects who might utilize the part of the city that was intended for commercial‐residential mixed‐use zoning. I examine how the course facilitators mediated the tōjisha talk using a semiotic ideology by instructing the discussants to list potential figures who might publicize the city by performatively enacting their citizenship using public spaces and exchanging symbolic artifacts in the city. This demonstrates how the male facilitators exercised their power to produce tōjisha as human capital that markets the city, which resulted in a breach in the gendered division of labor that historically produced and used public spaces for self‐cultivation and community development. I argue that a bourgeois, masculinist public sphere acts as a gatekeeper of Japan's dual civil society, by mediating the subjectivization of individuals through lifelong learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]