Introduction

Summary

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.