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.

In this chapter, we draw on the cultural-historical ideas explained in Chapter 7 and Vygotsky’s work on crises and turning points in development to discuss primary and middle school-age children and how they can be supported as agentic learners taking forward their social situations of development. Support and challenge come through how environments are structured and through interactions and relationships, which involve family members, teachers and the other professionals. Key to becoming agentic learners is children’s use of cognitive tools such as literacy and numeracy, which enable them to engage with the knowledge that is valued in society and address the challenges presented to them. We explain that supporting the competent use of these tools involves taking the child’s perspective to understand their motive orientation and giving care-full relational guidance that demystifies the demands on them. We consider how digital tools and processes such as Assessment for Learning can develop learner agency. We introduce Hedegaard’s work on the double move in pedagogy and the Radical-Local initiative, which builds on Davydov’s work. Both are elaborated in Chapter 9. We conclude by discussing a cultural-historical account of resilience, which focuses on enhancing children’s agency and its importance for social inclusion.