Affordances theory and children’s agency in outdoor contexts: a review of the literature

This paper aims to examine the connections in the international literature over the past deca-de between affordance theory and children’s agency in early childhood education in outdoor settings. A scoping review of 46 contributions was conducted to highlight the existing relationships between the two theories, which revealed the presence of different in-terpretations of affordance theory and possible decli-nations of agency’s notion, particularly in the outdo-or educational contexts. The search for connections showed that more recent declinations of affordance theory, particularly those that consider context from a sociocultural perspective, proved to be of particu-lar interest, as they include more or less explicitly the notion of agency in the reflection. In addition, the li-terature review has shown that outdoor educational contexts prove to be particularly interesting because they support the actualization of affordances and, thus, the expression of children’s agency: the com-plexity, multiplicity, and variability of invitations for actions present in outdoor contexts, suggest multiple possibilities for use and interpretations. In this type of context, each child is configured as an actor in his or her own educational experience.