This chapter focusses on how insights from Vygotsky’s work on child and adolescent development can be employed to create a relational pedagogy that nurtures the agency of students as learners, enabling them to be creative makers of their and their communities’ futures. These insights are augmented by more recent contributions to his legacy. Consequently, the role of motive orientation, imagination and agency in taking forward learners’ trajectories is discussed in relation to playworlds in early education settings, makerspaces in schools, the careful use of moral imagining in creating new futures for disengaged adolescents and responsive relational teaching in mainstream schooling. The four approaches all employ pedagogies which aim at the unfolding of student agency and which can be explained by the concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. The need for school systems to create environments where teachers can support student agency is recognised.

The concept of ‘agency’ demands theorization that captures the dynamic (in-motion) and collective nature (motive orientation) of practice. This chapter follows Edwards’ conceptualisation of relational agency and Stetsenko’s critique of grand narratives of agency, viewing agency as central to relational and transformative practice. Methodologically, the chapter argues in favour of researching incomplete practices in their making or formation rather than complete, fossilised, best practice examples. Data from the initial teacher education programme and teacher sharing meetings show how motive orientation for transformative and responsive professional action takes shape among teachers. It is argued that agentic action is historical and located in the collective system of practice. The findings of the study also put more weight behind arguments that understanding agentic action demands more interrogation of the ‘why’ and ‘where to’ questions of practice; that is, unpacking the ‘motion’ and ‘motive orientation’ of the practice.

The chapter examines how children can be supported relationally and care-fully in their development as agentic learners at home and at school. Drawing on examples, we highlight the emotional aspects of learning and the role of motive orientation in engaging learners with powerful knowledge. We argue that, while affect is usually central to family relationships, practitioners will find the relational concepts of relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency helpful when encouraging learners’ positive affective relationships with the environments that they provide in their professional settings. We introduce a cultural-historical model of a teaching and learning sequence, which aims at nurturing learner agency and their use of conceptual understandings in their actions on the world. The model is drawn on in subsequent chapters and highlights the changing role of teachers throughout the sequence of activities. The chapter also traces the work of cultural-historical theorists Galperin, Davydov and El’konin and the construction of developmental teaching taken forward by Davydov and Elkonin. How an understanding of a relational pedagogy can also enhance work on school inclusion is also discussed.

This chapter focuses on how children’s everyday knowledge when entering school is different from subject matter knowledge and argues that children’s emotional imagination and motive orientation is a foundation for their acquisition of subject matter knowledge. We discuss how imagination supports children’s generalizations of experience, so that it becomes possible for them to move between the general and the concrete in analyzing and using knowledge about the world. We also argue for a dialectical relationship between the culturally developed content the children’s encounters in their interactions in the world and the formation of mind. Within the cultural-historical approach to learning and development Davydov was the first to clarify how concepts, within a subject matter system, that are related through the historical development of its content may become the foundation for children learning in school. Supporting the development of theoretical thinking among school pupils serves both to develop thinking with subject matter knowledge, and support children’s person formation.

Education and child development are intrinsically intertwined. For us, development is not a predetermined unmediated unfolding of moves toward maturity. Rather, development is seen in relation to cultural expectations recognizing the potential agency of the learner in relation to these expectations. Hedegaard’s Wholeness Approach with its three different perspectives, the societal, the institutional practices and the person’s perspective is central to how we understand children’s development. The societal perspective, gives the conditions that a society with it cultural traditions and values create for children’s participation in different institutional practices. The practice perspective focuses on children’s participation in the different activity settings that characterize a given institutional practice like the breakfast and leaving for school setting, and the homework setting in a family. The demands children meet through participation in these settings are the focus for understanding children’s interactions with caregivers and their social situations. The person perspective focuses on the children’s intentions, agency and motive orientations, which may be different for children in different age periods. We have argued that age periods and the demands children meet as they move through different societal practices are crucial for understanding their social situation of development. Vygotsky’s account of the neoformation of higher psychological functions is introduced and how their emergence in a child’s consciousness changes a child’s relation to their environment and in particular their emotional relation to their world.