Education and child development are intrinsically intertwined. For us, development is not a predetermined unmediated unfolding of moves toward maturity. Rather, development is seen in relation to cultural expectations recognizing the potential agency of the learner in relation to these expectations. Hedegaard’s Wholeness Approach with its three different perspectives, the societal, the institutional practices and the person’s perspective is central to how we understand children’s development. The societal perspective, gives the conditions that a society with it cultural traditions and values create for children’s participation in different institutional practices. The practice perspective focuses on children’s participation in the different activity settings that characterize a given institutional practice like the breakfast and leaving for school setting, and the homework setting in a family. The demands children meet through participation in these settings are the focus for understanding children’s interactions with caregivers and their social situations. The person perspective focuses on the children’s intentions, agency and motive orientations, which may be different for children in different age periods. We have argued that age periods and the demands children meet as they move through different societal practices are crucial for understanding their social situation of development. Vygotsky’s account of the neoformation of higher psychological functions is introduced and how their emergence in a child’s consciousness changes a child’s relation to their environment and in particular their emotional relation to their world.

Developmental teaching has a long history starting with Vygotsky’s ideas of teaching reaching into the zone of proximal development, an accomplishment that only are possible with the help of qualified teachers. Developmental teaching is oriented both to children’s acquisition of competence and to their formation as persons acquiring theoretical thinking and motive orientation. Central ideas in developmental teaching are that general knowledge in the form of core relations should come before specific and concrete knowledge, and that children through agentic but also teacher-guided exploration should be able to acknowledge these conceptual relations. These ideas have been extended with Hedegaard’s ideas of the double move in teaching and learning. In this process, teaching is a double and moving back to qualify children’s… knowledge to subject matter knowledge and back to quality children’s concept formation. This is illustrated in a project focusing on the subjects of biology, human geography and history working with oppositions, using children’s everyday knowledge and questions to create their activities and motivation for exploration. The Radical-Local approach extends the double move with inclusion of aspects of children’s community as a process of movement from the local to the general and the general to the local. The chapter also addresses assessment challenges through presenting a questionnaire addressing the child’s social situation of development, to capture the child’s perspective on their participation in school practices.

This chapter describes two principles for supporting trainees. The Scaffolding Principle describes how support should be adapted to accommodate a trainee’s current skill to keep them in a “high challenge/high support” learning mode. The Reflection Principle describes ways in which training should encourage active reflection in trainees so they can learn how to constantly reflect on their own performance and apply new insights to future situations. The chapter provides examples of intelligent tutoring systems that employ adaptive scaffolding techniques, along with other types of learning applications. The chapter also discusses strategies for encouraging learners to reflect on their training experiences.

Early years teaching programs at undergraduate level introduce student teachers to sociocultural theorists such as Vygotsky, Bruner and Rogoff. Situating teaching techniques within these theoretical perspectives encourages student teachers to work with children within the metaphor of a ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky) to ‘scaffold’ (Bruner) children from one level of knowledge to the next through ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff). Understanding pedagogical interaction as a social and collaborative event between teacher and child is fundamental, but these metaphors can be challenging – particularly for pre-service teachers – in the practical implementation of early years curricula frameworks. Excerpts of real-life everyday interactions between teachers and young children explored using conversation analysis can demonstrate what the role of the early years teacher might look like when participating in a ‘zone of proximal development’ with children. The skilful ways in which teachers ‘scaffold’ learning with children through ‘guided participation’ in verbal and non-verbal turn taking will then be demonstrated. Through this exploration, the chapter brings together contemporary socio-cultural approaches to early years teaching and ethnomethodology’s concern with the practical achievement of participation to explain how participation frameworks provide a useful lens for understanding pedagogical interaction between children and teachers.

This chapter examines the role of corrective feedback from a sociocultural perspective. Much of the theoretical argument for feedback and the role of negotiation has been within a cognitive or cognitive-interactionist approach. However, another theoretical framework for understanding the role of feedback comes from the Vygotskian sociocultural theory. This chapter begins with a discussion of this theoretical view, its underlying concepts, and their contributions to our understanding of the role of language, interaction, and the field of error correction. It then reviews corrective feedback research conducted within this framework. The studies reviewed include those that have examined various premises of the sociocultural theory as they relate to corrective feedback and also those that have compared feedback when conceptualized within a cognitive-interactionist perspective and feedback when conceptualized within a sociocultural perspective. The chapter concludes with implications of the issues discussed for effective corrective feedback practices in language classrooms.

The term, open architecture, originates in the information technology world, where open architecture is designed to make adding, upgrading and swapping components easy. Open Architecture Curricular Design (OACD) in language learning promotes continual change of activities and tasks according to learner needs, specifically their styles, strategies, level of fossilization, interests, and zone of proximal development. At early levels, a textbook is frequently (though not always) used to ensure all learners are exposed to the same content corpus, with focus on structure and lexicon. The OACD teacher creates flexible lesson plans according to a thematically-based syllabus based on authentic materials. The teacher, who takes on the role of advisor, mentor, and partner, negotiates aspects of the syllabus and lesson plans with the learners, using formative, educative assessments to achieve the ultimate goal-to transform learners into bicultural people.