Sociocultural Psychology and Regulatory Processes in Learning Activity: Contributions of Cultural-Historical Psychological Theory

Written by educational researchers and professionals working with children and adolescents in and out of school, this book shows how self-regulation involves more than an isolated individual’s ability to control their thoughts and feelings, particularly in a learning environment. By using Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychological theory, the authors provide a unique set of four analytical lenses for a better understanding of how self-regulation, co-regulation, and other-regulation function as a system of regulatory processes. These lenses move beyond a focus on solitary individuals, who self-regulate behavior, to centre on individuals as relational, agential, and contextually situated. As agents, teachers and their students build their learning contexts and are influenced by these self-engineered contexts. This is a dynamic perspective of a social context and underlies the view that regulatory processes are an integral part of a functional system for learning.