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In this article, a call is made for educational research starting from a transactional epistemology in order to explore the conditions and prerequisites for realising the desirable in educational practices (Biesta, 2010). Furthermore, two ethnographic studies, conducted with such an approach, are presented. The first study explores the democratic, deliberative qualities of writing processes, where a teacher and six children write a common narrative. The second study explores children’s agency when writing individual narratives. Both studies show how educational practices, in this case literacy activities, in school can be the place for children to make democratic experience and having agency when children and their initiatives are taken seriously.

The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, it aims to explore the interactional conditions in terms of democratic qualities constituted in collective writing in a primary school classroom; and secondly, it aims to examine whether a set of deliberative criteria is fruitful as an analytical tool when studying classroom interaction. Theoretically, I turn to New Literacy Studies for understanding the writing classroom as a literacy practice and the actual (collective) writing as literacy events. The study has an ethnographic approach in which classroom observations were conducted during a collective writing process involving six nine-year-old children and their teacher. The observations included, two lessons, divided into 3 hours, which were observed, videotaped, and transcribed. The teacher had planned for a strict interactional or didactical order during the collective writing in which the children were to respond individually. However, the children responded in a different manner by starting a vivid dialogue in which they negotiated both the form and the content of the story. The analysis shows some deliberative qualities in this classroom interaction, while some other qualities were not evident. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the set of deliberative criteria was useful in visualizing both existing deliberative qualities in the interaction and the potential for developing such qualities.