Sociocultural Psychology and Regulatory Processes in Learning Activity: Contributions of Cultural-Historical Psychological Theory

Written by educational researchers and professionals working with children and adolescents in and out of school, this book shows how self-regulation involves more than an isolated individual's ability to control their thoughts and feelings, particularly in a learning environment. By using Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychological theory, the authors provide a unique set of four analytical lenses for a better understanding of how self-regulation, co-regulation, and other-regulation function as a system of regulatory processes. These lenses move beyond a focus on solitary individuals, who self-regulate behavior, to centre on individuals as relational, agential, and contextually situated. As agents, teachers and their students build their learning contexts and are influenced by these self-engineered contexts. This is a dynamic perspective of a social context and underlies the view that regulatory processes are an integral part of a functional system for learning.

Lynda D. Stone is Professor of Child and Adolescent Development at California State University, Sacramento, where she has received awards for Outstanding Teaching and Community Service. Her research examines teaching-learning practices with attention to learners from non-dominant communities.

Tabitha Hart is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at San José State University, California. Her research areas include speech codes theory, ethnography of communication, and technology-mediated communication.