Life in Cold Lake: childhood, mobility, and social structures

Introduction Whether at school, home, or in the wider community, children are active agents in the constant definition and redefinition of the social environments in which they participate. While it might be easy to simplify theoretical perspectives on socialization as a one-way process, much more complex mechanisms are at work. By their actions, the discourses in which they engage, and simply by their presence in an environment, children define and provide orientation to the structures that contribute to their identity building. In comparison with adults, most children do not have a developed capacity to express their motivations and manifest an agency which would be defined by intentionality. Yet they nevertheless have needs and desires which guide their actions and subsequently have an impact on their environment in a way worth noting. This chapter presents and discusses the social structure encountered by the boys and girls of military families in École Voyageur, a K-12 French school situated in Cold Lake, Alberta in Canada. These children's lives are defined by a mobile lifestyle and the consistent presence of highly structured and gendered institutions of which they are a part. In order to explain the complexity of the processes that influence children's experiences of their social environment at École Voyageur, I work from the perspective of the children themselves. I call upon fieldwork observations and interviews collected during fieldwork in 2009 and 2010 to show that children of military families at École Voyageur are important agents in the creation and maintenance of their social and cultural environment. By applying this perspective to my research with boys and girls of French-speaking military families in Cold Lake, it became clear that, aside from being actors in their environments, these children possessed considerable agency due to their importance in community maintenance for the various groups who sought their participation. On one side, the French-speaking minority required their involvement in its institution to insure its continuation and, on the other hand, the Canadian Forces had to find ways to enlist their moral support in order to promote operational efficacy by providing a stable home environment for military members. Here, I use the terms child and children broadly, in relation to school-age individuals from kindergarten to grade 12, and it therefore includes many who could also be otherwise described as youth rather than children.

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