Introduction

This book is about children, their learning and development as active agents with motives and intentions. It is also about what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being. It is therefore relevant to adults who work with children in different age periods from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age range. Practitioners, families and other carers are therefore key. We shall offer them tools for analyzing children’s development in ways that also capture practices, activities and children’s experiences. We also recognize that as children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly, but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day care or school or when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

One of our starting points is our concern that so many of society’s expectations for children are backward-looking, trying to fit children into institutions that have changed little. Sadly, these expectations do not recognize what children bring to situations from their life experiences or their motives for engaging with what education offers. We of course value powerful knowledge and, for example, want school-age children to be able to work knowledgeably on problems. But approaches to education that don’t pay attention to emotion, motive and agency, and which do not allow rounded pictures of children, are short-changing them. The result is that many children fail to engage with formal learning and other opportunities offered by society, so that their alienation and dropout are major problems for societies globally. Society is therefore also being short-changed, as it loses the contributions that these children and young people might make.

We therefore take two themes through the book. One is about being sensitive to children as agentic, with feelings and motive orientations, potentially able to propel themselves forward as learners. Their agency is central to how they negotiate their way in settings inhabited by the family carers and practitioners, who guide them toward adulthood. In these negotiations, children are seeking meaning, building their meaningful understandings of the practices they inhabit. Creating this understanding intertwines cognition with affect, embracing the child’s emotional engagement. We shall trace the mutual development of cognition and affect from infancy to late adolescence and show how emotional engagement may be expressed in different ways in different age periods. The second theme is what practitioners can do to work with the explanations we offer, especially in critical situations such as when children meet new expectations. We want to support professionals both in recognizing the emotional aspects of learning and development and in working relationally with children, by taking children’s emotions and motives seriously.

In order to look forward we look back to the cultural-historical psychology of Vygotsky (1896–1934) and those who have since worked with his legacy to relate it more closely than he did to education. We particularly draw on his ideas about children, learning and development and connect them, through our own work and that of others, to how children can be supported as curious and intentional beings.Footnote ¹ Vygotsky was a developmental psychologist whose central arguments were that the unity of the child and her environment characterized children’s development across in different age periods. Importantly, this means that we should not locate a child’s difficulties within the child, but instead examine the environments they are acting in and adjust them to better support the child.

Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky1989, Reference Vygotsky1998) described the dynamic unity we are advocating as a child’s social situation of development. The extract below reveals the importance of agency in this dialectical relationship between child and environment and that the relationship changes as the child meets new social realities.

Vygtosky’s colleagues, D.B. El’konin (1972/Reference El’konin1999) and A.N. Leont’ev (Reference Leont’ev1978), and the next generation, including Bozhovich (Reference Bozhovich2009), Davydov (Reference Davydov1988–1989, Reference Davydov2008), Galperin (Reference Galperin, Cole and Maltzman1969), Lisina (Reference Lisina1985) and Zaporozhets (Reference Zaporozhets2002), have, in different ways, contributed to and extended this theoretical approach by studying different aspects of children’s social situations of development in different age periods.Footnote ²

One of the developments of this cultural-historical view has been Hedegaard’s emphasis on institutional practices and how they mediate the demands of wider society. Leont’ev described the dialectics that underpin a cultural-historical approach to human development with the statement: “[S]ociety produces the activity of the individuals forming it” (Leont’ev, Reference Leont’ev1978, p. 7). Hedegaard refined this definition by inserting the idea of institutional practices into this notion of society. She asks us to pay attention to what she describes as “the conceptualization of the historical institutionalized demands that mediate this [transformational] progress” (Hedegaard & Fleer, Reference Hedegaard and Fleer2013, p. 200). Edwards captures this meaning by describing practices in institutions as “knowledge-laden, imbued with cultural values and emotionally freighted by the motives of those who already act in them” (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, p. 5).

This development of Leont’ev’s work to focus on institutional practices is central to our intention to help practitioners help children. Hedegaard’s refinement means that practitioners and other carers have two tasks: making adjustments to practices to enable the unfolding of children’s agency and guiding children’s motive orientations so that they engage with activities in ways that reflect what matters in the practice. The focus on institutional practice also means that we can examine how practices give shape to the activities that comprise them and what is involved when children move between practices as they go from home to school to sports clubs and so on. Throughout this book, we therefore show the value of studying children’s learning and development through a lens that recognizes the dynamic and evolving unity of child and practice.

The Cultural-Historical Theoretical Underpinnings of Understanding Children’s Development

Vygotsky differentiated between children in different age periods. By age he did not mean chronological age, but the expectations in a society for how children in different life periods (early childhood, school-age and adolescence) should act. Importantly, he argued that the meanings connected with a child’s emotional experience may be different for children in different age periods, because they may have developed different needs and attributes and therefore are differently motivated toward the same situation. We can see this, for example, in how children of different age periods join in family interactions or games. Bozhovich later elaborated on Vygotsky’s view of how children’s emotional experiences are influenced by their age period. She argued that: “[I]t may be said that the function of [a child’s] experience is to orient to the subject within his environment and consequently motivate him” (1969, p. 213).

When a child makes a major life transition, such as from home care to nursery, from kindergarten to school or from school to higher education, they enter a new institutional practice where a new age period is socially constructed and a new social situation of development arises. In these transitions the child or young person reaches out to what is meaningful for them in the practices and may engage with ideas that are valued by caregivers in the practice and develops commitments. A central purpose of education, we shall argue, is to care-fully ensure that these commitments reflect what is valued by caregivers, such as the societal values that embrace collaboration, sociality, mutual responsibilities and life-competences. A key concept here is a child’s leading activity. Different institutions hold different expectations for children; while children’s own development means that they experience demands in line with those expectations. For example, in most societies play is a leading activity in the preschool years, while learning in educational settings is the leading activity in middle childhood. The leading activity is therefore the interaction with the environment that produces the kind of development that is valued by society.

Throughout this book, we shall highlight the important role of adults in supporting children as they make these transitions. Key to that support is recognizing children’s motive orientations, what they orient to in an activity. Hedegaard has described the development of motive orientations as follows: “Motive development can then be seen as a movement initiated by the child’s emotional experience related to the activity setting” (Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard, Hedegaard, Edwards and Fleer2012a, p. 21). Motive orientations give direction to how people recognize, interpret and take actions to respond to the demands in a practice and are therefore crucial to learning and development.

Learning and development often arise from conflicts in motives. Conflicts can occur when children meet new demands in a new institution. They can also arise when children have acquired new competences that do not fit into the existing practice (e.g., when children start to walk) or when children get a new motive orientation because of being bored in the current practice (e.g., when children in kindergarten start to orient to school because older siblings go to school) Conflicts or crises in children’s lives can therefore be seen as necessary, reflecting contradictions between a child’s different motives or between a child’s motives and the demands in the practices they are currently inhabiting. These crises may lead to a reorganization of a child’s whole relation to the activities and people in his everyday life (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1998). Development is therefore more than learning new competences or acquiring new motives. Development can be observed when children’s social relations to other people are reorganized in each practice that the children inhabit (such as home and kindergarten) (Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard2012b). Crises are nonetheless only potentially productive for a child. They can become detrimental if caregivers do not support the child to move forward and generate new motives and competences to meet new demands.

In general, parents want to do what is best for their children, and practitioners in kindergarten, school and other institutions want to engage children in the activities they offer. But they frequently find themselves concerned about children and their actions. Often these concerns can reflect crises for both adults and children, from which they need to find a way forward. Examples of crises include the challenge of caring for an infant who cries when being taken to nursery, while their parents have difficulty in leaving them there; or a toddler who, just learning to walk, moves into dangerous situations; or when an adolescent who is new to a school finds it difficult to settle. Concerns can also include children’s lack of activity such as school refusal, or the anxiety of a shy child in a classroom setting, or a young person who is not able to communicate his intentions. We will not characterize such concerns as problems belonging to the individual child, and instead argue that they should be seen as relational problems belonging to new challenges or changes in children’s social situations and which call for action by carers and practitioners.

In brief, these crises are potential growth points and when they are negotiated fruitfully a child learns and, for example, becomes a school child able to orient toward new demands in the new setting. All children need help with these transitions and the shifts in motive orientation that they entail, and, as we shall see, some children require quite intensive support. We shall argue throughout the book that practitioners need to work relationally and care-fully with children, to support their new orientations. Our overarching aim is to reinstate care into a pedagogy that enables children’s agency in handling their social situations. Therefore, over the chapters we will describe a care-full process of reciprocity between a caring adult and a child as she or he negotiates their way forward and learns.

We turn to Lisina’s (Reference Lisina1985) research on infants and young children to explain how care can nurture agency. She writes about what has been translated as “love” in the following way.

Lisina sees the adult as the guide to development and writes: “[A] child can only acquire independence through his interaction with adults” (p. 91).

We are also in tune with Noddings’ writing on ethics, care and education. Like her, we recognize that a climate of care underpins successful pedagogy (Noddings, Reference Noddings2013); but we add a more detailed focus on how that climate is achieved through relationships. We therefore also agree with her emphasis on confirmation in interactions with children. Noddings explains the challenge: “To confirm another we must know and understand the other’s reality. Given the structure of today’s schooling, this may be asking the impossible” (Noddings, 2013, p. xix). We don’t underestimate the challenge, but throughout this book we shall offer examples of attentive listening and care-full interactions to show that it is not necessarily impossible.

In the chapters that follow, we examine how children are helped to negotiate transitions between institutional practices and orient toward demands within these. The chapters are organized by age periods. This is not because our approach is based in an unfolding of innate qualities as a child matures. Instead, by analyzing conflicts between children’s motive orientation and the different forms of possibilities and demands children meet in situations, we can reveal the crises that give rise to their development. We recognize that the demands connected to transitions both between and within practices will be different for children in different life periods. Our intention is to offer tools to carers and practitioners so that they can identify these crises and help guide children’s engagement as they participate in new practices.

A Wholeness Approach

So far we have focused on relationships between people and the demands of different practices. We are also aware of how practices, in families and schools, mediate the societal demands that arise through historically formed expectations and national policies. For example, in Denmark the objectives embedded in laws relating to schools focus on students’ subject-matter competences, while the statutory requirements for preschool provision emphasize play and social competences over other learning goals. The examples and analyses in this book will recognize such societal imperatives but will focus mainly on the coevolution of the dynamic unities of children and the practices in which the activities they participate in are embedded. To do so we look below statutory demands to reflect how different institutions interpret and enact societal priorities and what that means for the children and young people in activities within the practices.

Hedegaard’s work on what she has termed ‘a Wholeness Approach’ (Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard2012b, Reference Hedegaard2014) has demonstrated how the practices of different institutions such as families, day care and schools mediate broader societal values and shape the activities that occur within the practices. Such mediation is fashioned by what matters for practitioners in each institution and gives rise to the expectations held for children and young people as they engage in, and in turn shape, the activities.

Figure 1.1 (Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard2012b) shows the interrelated analytic perspectives that comprise the Wholeness Approach. These are ways of entering an analysis of how societal priorities, such as those embedded in laws, national policies as well as values and norms in cultural traditions, are mediated into institutional practices such as those found in families and schools, and evidenced in activity settings within practices, such as mealtimes or classrooms. In brief, what matters in a practice gives shape to the activities within its activity settings and the demands the activities make on those who engage with them. For us the central analytic entry point in this book is how children enter activity settings, meet activities and bring to bear their own motives and competences when engaging.

Figure 1.1 Different perspectives for analyzing children’s development

As researchers who focus on how children learn and develop, our aim is to understand how children experience institutional practices and the activities in them, while recognizing that these practices are located in wider societal conditions.

In her work with families and practitioners over the years, Hedegaard has emphasized the need to relate to children, to try to see how they are experiencing and interpreting the demands to be found in activities that are situated in different practices. First and foremost, this relating involves understanding the child’s actions from the child’s perspective, how the child experiences the world. Here Hedegaard is following Vygotsky’s observation (Vygotsky, Reference Kagan2019) that the world does not influence the child directly but is mediated through the child’s emotional orientation founded in the child’s social situation of development.

Vygotsky’s developmental focus is important here. It reminds us that a child’s perspective and emotional experiences in these practices are dependent on the child’s age period (Bozhovich, Reference Bozhovich, Cole and Maltzman1969). Children’s emotional development is connected with the development of the other psychic functions, such as imagination and memory, and cannot be understood independently of these. We elaborate the development of psychic functions in chapters that follow. Here we simply note that children’s development of emotions involves making meaning through their growing understanding of cultural signs, such as the way language and facial expressions are used. At the same time, children learn to regulate their emotional responses in line with cultural expectations (Holodynski, Reference Holodynski2013). Consequently, families and practitioners need to see children as active subjects with motives and intentions that influence how they act in different institutional activity settings.

A Wholeness Approach also recognizes that in a single day children can engage in several practices with other children and adults (Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard2009). Consequently, a child experiences several social situations that together become part of their social situation of development. In this way a child’s life is interconnected through their everyday participation across different institutional practices, giving rise to a multiplicity of social relations. A developmental perspective therefore sees a child’s life as a pathway through central institutions such as family, nursery, kindergarten and school. Children’s life courses, therefore, can be seen as pathways through the possible trajectories that a society affords its citizens (Hundeide, Reference Hundeide2005).

This does not mean that their life courses are societally determined; our emphasis on agency and meaning-making ensures that we reflect the dynamic unity that is the social situation of development. One aspect of that dynamic unity is seen in the negotiations that children make when they move, for example, from the informal practices of family life with their own sets of expectations, to the formality of school and the need for motive orientations that allow them to interpret and engage with school activities. They also need to negotiate when engaging in afterschool sporting or other activities and interacting with peers, where expectations are again different.

The processes involved in connecting demands from school with motives and competences in the context of family life are revealed in Hedegaard and Fleer’s (Reference Hedegaard and Fleer2008) family research. There, Hedegaard followed four children in a middle-class Danish family, the Frederiksberg family: Kaisa (4 years), Emil (6 years), Lulu (8 years) and Laura (10 years). Each child was seen as having a different social situation of development and different motive orientations, through being oriented to different practices outside the family. Kaisa and Emil were still in preschool practice, with Emil just starting in the transition class, class zero, which prepares him for formal schooling. Lulu and Laura were school-age children oriented to activities and friends in school.

Following the children during the week, the researchers found that the children participate in several practices. All of them participate in shared activity settings in the family; only Kaisa participates in kindergarten practices and only Emil in the transition class. Both Lulu and Laura participate in school, and Emil and Lulu are involved in afterschool practices. Only Laura attends club activities. Sometimes they visit friends and one evening each week Lulu and Laura go to gymnastics. We will return to this family in later chapters where we follow how the children’s participation in different practices influences the shared family activities. One such example is how Lulu’s school practice, through being given homework, influences home practice for the whole family. We will illustrate this here with an observation extract from a mid-week homework setting in the Frederiksberg family.Footnote ³ When analyzing the children in this activity setting, we can see that although in the same situation, each child’s social situation of development is different and is reflected in their different motive orientations.

Homework is a recurrent setting in the family with the mother as the center. In this actual setting, the mother tries to motivate Lulu to engage with her math homework. Laura and Emil also contribute to what is going on in the setting, through what they engage in and talk about. Mother influences Lulu’s social situation but Mother’s situation is also very much influenced by the children’s activities, where she also has to take care of the youngest child, Kaisa, who is not oriented to school activities.

Importantly, children create their specific social situations of development; they are not passively determined by the conditions around them. In the homework setting, the four children each have their specific social situation of development, based in how they experience the situation with their different motive orientations. They each should be seen as active subjects who cocreate the conditions in which they live together with other participants such as parents, siblings, carers, professionals and other children. Children not only cocreate their own living conditions, as we can see from this extract; they also contribute to the creation and affirmation of the conditions of other co-participants.

A Relational Approach to Education

We are advocating a highly skilled way of working with children. We see education as a relationship of reciprocity between a caring adult and a child or young person. But we do not see this in terms of the low-status, usually female, emotional labor of the kind Hochschild describes as relational service-based work (Hochschild, Reference Hochschild1983). In contrast, we present this reciprocity, aimed at encouraging attention to motives and engagement, as part of the repertoire of skilled practitioners. In doing this we recognize that parents and other family carers will differ from practitioners in how they enact the reciprocity. But both will be oriented toward enabling the unfolding of children and young person’s engaged agency as they address the demands and expectations embedded in activities.

This reciprocity involves taking seriously children’s feelings, sense-making and agentic searches after meaning. We have also noted that their agency is nurtured as it unfolds in environments where what matters for the child or young person, how they are interpreting demands, is recognized. These are not simplistic arguments for child-centered education. Rather they challenge practitioners to enter into caring relationships where they work with the agentic energy of children, while helping them connect with societal values, including the opportunity to question those values. These relationships are professional and different from the close, caring connections that a child has with family members. They are at the heart of a sound pedagogy, and we shall discuss how it is accomplished by practitioners in chapters that follow.

The key concepts that describe what is involved in this kind of relational work with children are based in cultural-historical theory (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, Reference Bantawa and Edwards2017), and are elaborated in later chapters. The concepts first emerged in analyses of how practitioners worked with women who were going through difficult times and attended an inner-city drop-in center (Edwards, Reference Edwards2005). The concepts were later used to explain how practitioners with different professional backgrounds collaborated across practice boundaries to support vulnerable children (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, Reference Nairn2011) and recently they have framed analyses of pedagogies in schools (Nyborg et al., Reference Nyborg, Mjelve, Edwards, Crozier and Coplan2022). Interprofessional collaboration is detailed in Chapter 3 and a care-full relational pedagogy with children and young people is explained in Chapter 7. Here we introduce the relational ideas in the context of the drop-in center study, where we show a pedagogic relationship between a worker and a center user.

The central relational concepts are relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. Relational expertise is the capacity to elicit the motive orientations of others and to be explicit about one’s own motive orientations in relation to a problem area. These orientations then comprise common knowledge, in the sense that each now knows what matters for the others, how they are interpreting the problem and how they might act on it. Common knowledge can then become a resource or, in Vygotskian terms, a tool that can mediate collaboration on the problem, which is now shared. This collaboration, while taking action on the problem, is the unfolding of relational agency. It is an unfolding that aims, when working pedagogically, to nurture and support the agency of persons as they meet new demands in new practices and learn something new.

One example from the drop-in center study is how a center worker supported a regular user of the center. The user had received a final demand for payment from her electricity provider and was in danger of being cut off from supplies. The worker exercised relational expertise by listening care-fully to the woman, eliciting what mattered for her, taking all her concerns seriously. She was also explicit about what mattered for her as a practitioner. She wanted the woman to find a way of paying and continue to use the center and contribute to its climate of support. The common knowledge built in the discussion led to jointly expanding their understanding of the problem so that it changed from being “I’m going to get cut off” to “how shall we sort payments?”. This common knowledge was brought into play again as they jointly planned how to approach the electricity company. At this point the relational agency, joint agency of worker and user, began to unfold. This all took place before on-line contact with energy suppliers was the norm, so the worker and center user, together, visited the company office. While there the worker supported the user while she negotiated monthly payments of an amount she could afford.

Throughout the process, the agency of the center user was nurtured. First her concerns were taken seriously, and the worker reciprocated by being explicit about hers. The user’s interpretations of the problem were respected as they jointly worked on interpreting and expanding the problem area. Finally, the user’s agency was gradually enhanced, first through quite close joint work on the plan and then, when the user took the lead supported by the worker, at the electricity office. These relational processes are central to the relationships that we shall be advocating when practitioners work with each other and how they support children as agentic learners.

We shall propose that practitioners’ support and guidance may benefit from building “relational expertise” (Edwards, Reference Edwards2010, Reference Edwards2017). Situations of concern may arise between practitioners and between practitioners and families. In brief, relational expertise involves respectfully recognizing and working with what matters (the motive orientations) for fellow participants and being open about what matters for oneself, while collaborating on issues of concern. Relational expertise, we shall suggest, can enable collaborations that focus on how to help changing children’s social situations when caregivers are concerned about a child or young person.

As well as discussing relationships between practitioners and between practitioners and families, we will draw on these concepts to discuss nurturing the unfolding agency of the child or young person. Children are creators of their social situations of development in the different practices they participate in and are coauthoring their developmental pathways with families, practitioners and friends. We shall therefore take a dual focus to capture the perspectives and intentions of the child or young person and of their caregivers.

When working with children these interactions call for professional clarity and careful listening and observing. The practitioner therefore needs to ask questions that include the following:

The processes we are advocating involve care-full observing as well as sensitive conversations. We discuss the methodology and what needs to be captured in observations of a child and their social situation of development in Chapters 2 and 4. Here we simply note that Hedegaard’s interactive observation method (1990/Reference Hedegaard2013, Reference Hedegaard, Hedegaard and Fleer2008a, Reference Hedegaard, Hedegaard and Fleerb, Reference Hedegaard, Hedegaard and Fleerc) involves following the child, trying to capture how the child is interpreting the demands in practices and making meaning. This dual attention to actor and environment has led Hedegaard to suggest that a focus solely on the child is insufficient. Rather, we also need to examine practices and the demands in them that are being experienced by the child (Hedegaard, Reference Hedegaard2009, Reference Hedegaard2012b). In the next section we introduce our concern with social inclusion and the need to sustain this dual focus in order to create interventions that enable the participation of children in what society has to offer.

Unfolding Agency for Social Inclusion

Our current sociopolitical environments are marked by huge discrepancies in wealth within nation-states and massive differences in access to health and education services across national boundaries. These differences are experienced by some children and their families as exclusion from the benefits that society offers those with greater social and material capital. In short, they are socially excluded. Poverty is the major cause, but racism can play a part as can social class. Part of the answer, we suggest, is to enable the unfolding of children and young people’s agency so that they come to be active participants in society.

Shotter interpreted this aim as one feature of Vygotsky’s attention to the dynamic unity of person and practice. He argued: “Vygotsky is concerned to study how people, through the use of their own social activities, by changing the conditions of their own existence can change themselves” (Shotter, Reference Shotter1993, p. 111). If this line is taken, our focus on the unity of child and environment and what practitioners can do to nurture agency, opens up possibilities for adjustments to practices that allow the unfolding of agency. These adjustments may enable children to change “the conditions of their own existence” (Shotter, Reference Shotter1993). We are not advocating social mobility for the few. Rather, we are arguing for a pedagogy that care-fully strengthens the agency of children and the communities they contribute to.

This agency is relational both in how it is nurtured and how it feeds a collective form of agency for the common good. Our use of the term agency owes much to the work of Charles Taylor. It unfolds in our actions on the world and in Taylor’s view it rejects “the hegemony of disengaged reason and mechanism” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989, p. 461). Values and emotion are central to how agency is enacted. Taylor was particularly concerned that the agency he advocated should not produce overweening selves who are disconnected from the common good (Taylor, Reference Taylor1991).

Vygotsky’s concluding reflections in his early writings for teachers show how important skillful pedagogy was to supporting the creative agency of children so that they might build the new reality he was seeking for his fellow Russians.

In this book we differentiate between social inclusion and school inclusion, while recognizing their connections. We give a cultural-historical account of resilience and interventions for social inclusion in Chapter 8, and throughout the book we discuss how a care-full relational pedagogy can aid students’ school inclusion.

How the Book Is Organized

Our focus is on relationships within different institutional practices and across the developmental pathways of children and young people. Our aim is to look forward, by (i) offering practitioners and researchers ways of understanding the changing dynamic unity of person and activity in different practices in a child’s life course; and (ii) helping them recognize and support the emotional and motivational aspects of children and young people’s engagement with demands that take their learning forward. In doing so we have emphasized the developmental potential to be found in the conflicts of motives that occur during transitions between the different leading practices of nursery, preschool and school, and the role of caregivers in helping shape children’s motive orientations.

In this chapter, we have set out some of the key themes to be found across the next ten chapters. We recognize that some readers might like to focus on specific topics, such as the preschool years or adolescence. But these age-related chapters draw on chapters where core ideas are elaborated, in particular Chapters 2 and 3. In addition, because we shall be discussing how previous age periods contain signs of emerging motives and competences, we warn against taking too narrow a focus on age when selecting what to read.

In Chapters 2 and 3, we lay out the central ideas as they have been developed in our own work and those of others. Chapter 2 details our view of child development through childhood with a particular focus on Hedegaard’s Wholeness Approach. In Chapter 3, we present four ways in which the three relational concepts can be used by practitioners in their collaborations with other practitioners and with parents or carers. The ideas in these two chapters permeate the whole book and give it coherence. Chapters 4 and 5 draw on research that takes the perspective of young children to explain their development as they negotiate the practices they inhabit. They deal respectively with the development of toddlers and preschool children.

Chapters 6 and 7 act as bridges to a focus on school-age children. In Chapter 6 we consider children’s engagement with knowledge, seeing working with knowledge as an important element in our concerns with children’s social inclusion. Chapter 7 is where we work with the three relational concepts described in Chapter 3 to explain a care-full relational pedagogy. We suggest that Chapters 6 and 7 are essential reading in preparation for the next three chapters. In Chapter 8, we discuss the agency and learning of children of primary school age and also address issues of resilience and social inclusion. In Chapter 9, we discuss forms of knowledge and what that means for children’s learning and draw on teaching experiments that exemplify the power of Hedegaard’s work on the double move in teaching. In Chapter 10, we move on to adolescents, their learning and transitions to adulthood. The final chapter is where we focus on what people can do to support children as agentic engaged learners. It therefore looks forward by discussing the implications of the preceding chapters for the professions that work with children.

Throughout this book, we give real-life examples from our own research as well as drawing on some of the foundational work of Vygotsky and the researchers who have followed and extended his theory over the last century. We also discuss the exciting cultural-historically informed work currently being carried out by our contemporaries. We are not alone in our conviction that a care-full relational pedagogy is good for children and young people and for society. We therefore hope that this book contributes usefully to a growing field.