W dyskusjach wielu dyscyplin naukowych kategoria sprawstwa (agency) stała się jedną z centralnych. W teoretycznych rozważaniach na ten temat przodują, obok dziedzin ekonomiczno-politycznych, filozofia i socjologia. Antropologia kulturowo-społeczna zasadniczo nie podejmuje badań nad sprawstwem. Wyjątek stanowi koncepcja Alfreda Gella, którego analizy mają charakter antropologiczno-społeczny oraz fenomenologiczny. Ten specyficzny miks dyscyplin zaowocował w badaniach Brytyjczyka teorią sztuki bazującą na oryginalnej formule kategorii sprawstwa. Prezentacja oraz ocena jej funkcjonalności są głównym przedmiotem artykułu.
The term “cause” is ubiquitous in life and science. It is surprising how, generally speaking, the existing all-purpose dictionaries, and even «professional» ones, are clumsy in their attempts to define “cause” and its derivative terms. We urgently need a more satisfactory definition of these words, along the following lines: an acting of object x on object y is the cause of the change in object y, when at the same time object x acts on object y, object y changes, and if something of the type of object x acts on an object of the type of object y, then object y changes. When expanding the proposed definition, I consider, among others: (a) traditional counterarguments aimed at the existence of cause-effect relation, (b) the question of necessity as a component of the notion of causality, (c) the notion of acting on something and the circumstances of its occurrence, (d) the essence of change, and (e) the causality principle. In addition, I sketch the relation of the reconstructed notion of causality to the notions of motivation, perpetration, and the act of creation (in arts and in Catholicism).
In this text, a critical reflection is presented on assessment practices in early childhood education, which are discussed in the context of the creation by those practices of the students’ sense of agency which, according to J. Bruner, is treated as a category of school culture. The discussion is based on the results of the recent research conducted in Poland on students’ agency and an analysis of the data collected as part of the author’s own research.
The picture obtained by using the triangulation of methods and sources confirms that assessment in early childhood education strips children of the opportunity to build a sense of agency, even in terms of independent control of a task situation. The surveyed students, admittedly, are capable of a relatively independent reflection on the context of school assessment, but the world of their educational experience is limited to the incapacitating culture of the school grade. It is a culture that becomes one of the sources of children’s self-restraint in the perception of themselves as agents, perpetuating their external steerability and passivity. To change this situation, external regulations will not suffice, but only the organizing of the learning environment based on the relationship between the teacher and the student, which is free from the daily pressures of assessment and the worship of formal correctness.