Conceptualizing the Child's Creative Agency in the Reading of Picturebooks: A Reconsideration of Stuart Hall's Reception Theory and Khosrow Bagheri's Human Agency Theory
Naime Shafiee
1
(
PhD student in Philosophy of Education, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran
)
Morad YariDehnavi
2
(
دانشگاه شهید باهنر
)
hr alavi
3
(
Professor of Philosophy of Education, Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran
)
Keywords: Picturebooks, Child's Creative Agency, Reception Theory, Stuart Hall, Khosrow Bagheri.,
Abstract :
This study aims to conceptualize the child's "creative agency" as a key philosophical-educational capacity of picturebooks, formulating this concept through a reconsideration of two theoretical frameworks. The main research question is: How can the child's "creative agency" be explained and redefined by reconsidering Stuart Hall's "reception theory" and Khosrow Bagheri's "human agency theory"? To answer this question, content analysis and conceptual reasoning were employed. First, the components of creative agency were extracted from the qualitative content analysis of fifteen picturebooks. These components were then brought into dialogue with Hall's reception theory (emphasizing negotiated and oppositional decoding) and Bagheri's human agency theory (emphasizing meaning-giving agency, reflection and commitment, imagination and freedom, and foundational as well as existential identity formation). To avoid theoretical eclecticism, a "theoretical stratification" strategy was adopted: Hall's theory was applied at the processual level (explaining how meaning is produced), and Bagheri's theory was applied at the existential level (explaining the nature and purpose of agency). The findings reveal that creative agency in reading picturebooks is the child's capacity, as a "meaning-giving agent" (Bagheri), for "negotiated/oppositional decoding" (Hall) of gaps between text and image, visual metaphors, open endings, and narrative tensions—leading to the creation of new meanings and the existential transformation of the child. This formulation elevates the child from a passive consumer of meaning to a "co-creator of meaning." .
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