‘I like it when I can sit with my best friends’: Exploration of children’s agency to achieve commensality in school mealtimes

Mealtimes are considered as complex socialising situations that transmit important sociocultural norms imposed by adult authorities. In this chapter, we argue that rather than children being passive recipients by those sociocultural mealtime norms, they act agentically, working around the norms, modifying and transforming their own frames for thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. We illustrate how children use non-verbal communication to socially and spatially organise and negotiate material and moral complexities to achieve commensality during school mealtimes. Commensality is the act of eating together and is often considered important for social communion. It underpins the core value of mealtime practices. To illustrate our argument, we draw on empirical material taken from the first author's doctoral research of children’s school mealtime socialisation from a child-centred perspective. The data featured in this chapter originates from one of several semi-structured group interviews with children, who regularly ate together during the school mealtime. The thematic analysis of the interview extract addresses how children worked around the mealtime structure and rules; how they relate to one another and negotiate seating arrangement for achieving commensality. School mealtimes are an important context in which we, researchers alike, learn something new about children’s socialisation in the commensality practice and employ children’s disruptions as a source of critical examination of our normative understanding of the children’s socialisation process.