The Introduction provides an overview of our approach to behavioral regulation as grounded in the theoretical work of Vygotsky and other related social and cultural theorists. From our approach, regulatory processes emerge from relational and agential processes of engagement in the learning practices of local communities such as classrooms, after-school programs, or homes. These processes are continuously interwoven with a community2019s cultural and semiotic resources. By focusing on relational and agential processes of learners and their teachers and mentors, our approach moves beyond the more common focus on self-regulation to a focus on all forms of behavioral regulation including self-, other-, co-, and socially shared regulation as relational parts of a whole system of regulatory processes for gaining, maintaining, and displaying intellectual and social-emotional competencies in the lived world. We introduce four novel sociocultural lenses for observing and analyzing regulatory processes in context and include a brief description of topics covered in the following chapters.

The Conclusion provides an overview of our theoretical approach and details how each of the four novel sociocultural lenses presented in this book offers observational and analytical tools for better understanding how behavioral regulation is a competency that is socially embedded and functions as a system of self-, other-, co-, and socially shared regulatory processes. Reconceptualizing competence as involving all forms of behavioral regulation moves away from the dualisms characteristic of traditional psychological approaches that divide the self from culture and the individual from society. Our analytical lenses do not reject the importance of an individual’s development of psychological and practical actions over time, but rather reframe them as part of a relational process of agency in which the regulated actions and interactions used to enact and develop intellectual and social emotional competences are always part of the sociocultural world.