Individual support roles, e. g. labelled as teaching assistants or paraprofessionals, have been established as resources of support for pupils with assigned special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in several European countries. In Germany, paraprofessional assistance is a child-centred, individually assigned resource with its legal background in social care. Both in German and international research, paraprofessional assistance is discussed in an ambivalent manner: While for many pupils with SEND paraprofessional assistance is prerequisite for attending mainstream education and participating in class, research also indicates a risk of stigmatization and internal exclusion due to the exclusive character of support practices (Sharma & Salend 2016). Studies have been addressing different challenges related to the paraprofessional’s role, professionalization and cooperation (Fritzsche & Köpfer 2022). The impact of the paraprofessionals’ individual support practices on the pupils’ interaction with peers, their social and curricular participation as well as their perception of the resource has only recently been receiving attention by research (Cameron 2014; Webster & Blatchford 2013). Existing research, however, focusses mostly on older pupils who are able to communicate verbally whereas younger pupils and those with high support needs are usually not included. The findings of existing studies indicate an ambivalent impact on the pupils’ participation: Some pupils use the support practices in order to meet class-related goals or to fulfil behavioural norms, but at the same time experience it as a partial giving up of their autonomy (Köpfer & Böing 2020). 

These findings implicitly refer to the concept of agency which can be considered a desideratum in school-related research. Agency, however, is regarded as a key concept in childhood studies where it is seen as a crucial part of childhood and growing up (James & James 2012). Children’s agency remains mostly unexplored regarding children with SEND and their experiences at school. Research shows that children with SEND are more likely to be restricted in their agency by adults and peers and experience less opportunities to negotiate spaces of acting (Devecchi et al. 2014; MacArthur et al. 2007). The impact of being individually supported by adults in school can be identified as a research gap. 

Taking into account the described research gaps regarding paraprofessional assistance and children’s agency, the proposal addresses the paraprofessionals’ impact on the children’s agency and their possibilities to negotiate spaces of acting, participation and belonging. It specifically focusses on younger pupils as well as nonverbal pupils with high support needs and also includes the practices and voices of their peers which have not been considered by research so far. The proposal addresses the following questions:

• How do pupils with and without assigned paraprofessional assistance negotiate agency?
• Which significance do the practices of the paraprofessionals have on the pupils’ practices and spaces of acting?

Due to its focus on both the pupils’ practices and the significance of paraprofessional assistance as a context of these practices, the proposal uses a multidimensional approach to agency which was developed as part of the presented PhD-study. This approach links a post-structural and an ecological understanding of agency. From a post-structural perspective, agency is understood both as the performative power to act emerging from performative acts of subjectivation (Butler 1997) and as a discursive positioning (Davies 1990), i. e. aligning one’s actions with a specific discursive practice. The ecological approach conceptualizes agency as “a temporal and relational phenomenon” which emerges from the “ecological conditions through which it is enacted” (Biesta et al. 2017, 40) focussing on how actors achieve, produce and enact agency within specific environments and under certain ecological conditions. The approach therefore analyses a performative, a discursive and a temporal-relational dimension of agency. 

The proposal will present the findings of an ethnographic PhD-study which was conducted in 2 inclusive primary schools in Germany. The ethnographic approach combined the method of participant observation in the classrooms with focus group interviews with the pupils. The method of participant observation was chosen to reconstruct the pupils’ practices in relation to the paraprofessionals’ practices. Furthermore, it took into account that some of the pupils with paraprofessional assistance were nonverbal and communicated on a presymbolic level. The focus group interviews were used to provide the pupils with a space to express their voices (Lundy 2007) and offered a more direct approach to peer-cultural practices due to the absence of teachers and paraprofessionals. Topics being discussed in the focus group interviews included friendship, classroom and breaktime activities, adults in the classroom and support practices. The verbal character of this methods and the resulting exclusion of nonverbal pupils can be regarded a limitation of the study which was met by the combination with the participant observation. The data collection was longitudinal and was realized over a period of 3 years. The observation protocols and transcribed focus group interviews were analysed by using Grounded Theory methodology and the related coding methods (Strauss & Corbin 1998) in order to identify key practices and manifestations of agency. In addition, selected observed situations and excerpts from the focus group interviews were analysed by using a sequence analytical approach. The sequence analysis used the method of ‘address analysis’ which focusses on reconstructing practices of subjectivation in modes of verbal and physical address which produce both subject positions and related spaces of acting (Rose & Ricken 2018). The proposal will present the results of the analysis of both the participant observation and the focus group interviews. It also aims to discuss the findings in the context of international research on paraprofessional assistance as well as children’s agency and participation and to also indicate relations to the European discourse on children’s rights.

The analysis shows that the children’s possibilities of negotiating agency and the spaces of acting that are available to them are linked to negotiations of participation and belonging. Both the observations and the focus group interviews indicate a restricting effect of the paraprofessionals’ practices on the pupils’ possibilities to negotiate agency. The pupils with SEND often experience practices of being regulated and addressed as disturbers, being deprecated or shamed by the paraprofessionals as well as having the paraprofessionals speaking or making decision for them. These practices do not only result in a risk of being excluded from classroom activities or peer interaction but extensively restrict their spaces of acting. The pupils’ possibilities of negotiating agency are limited to either accept the restricted spaces of acting and reproduce a positioning as dependent and incapable or to react in a subversive and resisting way. The analysis indicates that the restricting practices of the paraprofessionals are linked to their marginal position and agency within the classroom and school environment (Kakos 2022). However, the analysis does not only focus on the restricting effect on the pupils’ agency, but also on situations in which pupils jointly negotiate agency. The findings emphasize that possibilities of achieving agency emerge from peer-cultural practices in which the pupils jointly create spaces of belonging (Nind et al. 2022) while engaging with the adults’ practices, e. g. practices of behavioural regulation or restrictive support practices. Thus, the children create spaces of resistance as well as safe spaces which can be interpreted as a type of heterotopia (Foucault 1986). Moreover, Bhabha’s (1994) concept of the 'third space’ is used to analyse the creation of hybrid spaces as an ‘in-between’ of child-specific and pupil-related norms as well as adult-specific practices allowing the pupils to jointly perform a subversive form of agency.

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