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.

Through communication with caregivers, infants and toddlers come to orient intentionally to the world and their agency begins to unfold, initially through sharing intentions with adults. We show how the child’s emotional orientation to the world in the first three years of life happens through communication and is characterized by developmental periods that encompass other psychic functions. To understand children’s social situation from the child’s perspective, we have emphasized the need to attend to the child’s relations with others. We have therefore proposed taking a double perspective by focusing on both the child and the adults in their worlds. This is because the experiences of these very young children have to be seen in relation to how they are mediated by their caregivers. When caregivers or researchers orient to children’s perspectives, they never access it as a first perspective but always as a second, a relational, perspective and here we argue for Hedegaard’s formulated approach of the interactive observation. This method advocates a double perspective when researching children’s development, as the observations are mediated through the researcher’s experience.

In the preschool period the central activity is play. Through play young children become able to differentiate meaning from objects and actions. Play is therefore a way for children to acquire a conscious relation to the world that is revealed in how they come to plan play actions and create shared imagination. We have argued, following Vygotsky’s ideas, that in play children bring the most intimate and personal aspect of their lives into the realm of social life, in the same way that adults may do through art. We have also discussed how children rework their experience in play and how this contributes to their acquisition of everyday concepts that are a foundation for their concept formation in school. Caregivers may help children benefit from play activities by providing them with experiences that they may rework in play. Nonetheless, if caregivers enter young children’s play, they should be aware of how children create lifeworlds in play that may be interrupted by newcomers. We also argue for assessing children’s social situation of development by focusing on activities and not abilities and present a method developed for this purpose.

The cultural-historical concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency are introduced as central to the work of practitioners who offer a caring (care-full) relational approach to supporting the learning and development of others. Drawing on examples from the field, we examine how the concepts can explain interprofessional collaborations and the prevention of social exclusion, which may frequently include involving parents or carers in focusing on a difficult situation for a child. We consequently discuss and illustrate the concepts in professionals’ work with parents or carers, which aims at mutual support for a child’s social situation of development during transitions. We demonstrate how three concepts can explain how practitioners negotiate their way up a system to find additional support for a child who is in a situation of concern. Our final example is their use in an instrument that assesses the collaborative maturity of teams or networks. The use of the three relational concepts in pedagogy is detailed in Chapter 7.