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Children and young people are active agents with motives and intentions who can contribute to their social worlds. Taking children seriously involves both accessing their perspectives as they make sense of the world and working relationally with them to guide their motive orientations. In this book, Hedegaard and Edwards draw upon their own and others'research on children from birth to school leaving age to advocate for relational support for learners and to emphasise the caring aspects of this support. The authors provide a scholarly account of the cultural-historical underpinnings of their caring relational approach, while bringing these ideas to life through examples of practices in families and in more formal settings. Written for those who work with children and young people in varied capacities, this book reveals the knowledge and skills required for the subtle and reciprocal work of supporting the learning and development of children and young people.

Three core ideas are at the heart of this book: relational expertise, the capacity to interpret problems with others; common knowledge, which consists of knowing what matters for professionals in other practices; and relational agency, which involves using that common knowledge to take action with others. These ideas are based in cultural-historical approaches to learning and change, and give coherence to the arguments presented. This is not a recipe book; the ideas are offered as resources for reflecting on and developing professional and research practices, and the conditions in which they occur.

What can Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) contribute to the solution of the problems facing higher education today? This edited volume brings together the work of an international group of scholars and researchers to address this important question. Drawing on contemporary interpretations of CHAT, the contributors take on a wide range of issues, ranging from pedagogy to administration and from teacher preparation to university outreach. An introduction presents the key principles of CHAT. Subsequent chapters address such issues as effective ways of teaching large undergraduate classes, providing support for struggling writers or for students with disabilities, opening up opportunities for students from historically underserved communities, preparing students for the professions, and building bridges between higher education and the wider community. Readers with an interest in higher education will encounter ideas in these chapters that will prompt them to rethink their role in preparing today's students for tomorrow's challenges.

The contributors to this collection employ the analytic resources of cultural-historical theory to examine the relationship between childhood and children's development under different societal conditions. In particular they attend to relationships between development, emotions, motives and identities, and the social practices in which children and young people may be learners. These practices are knowledge-laden, imbued with cultural values and emotionally freighted by those who already act in them. The book first discusses the organising principles that underpin a cultural-historical understanding of motives, development and learning. The second section foregrounds children's lives to exemplify the implications of these ideas as they are played out - examining how children are positioned as learners in pre-school, primary school and play environments. The final section uses the core ideas to look at the implementation of policy aimed at enhancing children's engagement with opportunities for learning, by discussing motives in the organisations that shape children's development.