This chapter focusses on how insights from Vygotsky’s work on child and adolescent development can be employed to create a relational pedagogy that nurtures the agency of students as learners, enabling them to be creative makers of their and their communities’ futures. These insights are augmented by more recent contributions to his legacy. Consequently, the role of motive orientation, imagination and agency in taking forward learners’ trajectories is discussed in relation to playworlds in early education settings, makerspaces in schools, the careful use of moral imagining in creating new futures for disengaged adolescents and responsive relational teaching in mainstream schooling. The four approaches all employ pedagogies which aim at the unfolding of student agency and which can be explained by the concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. The need for school systems to create environments where teachers can support student agency is recognised.

In this chapter, we focus on an understudied aspect of children’s and youth’s civic engagement, namely their responsible agency. ‘Responsible agency’ draws attention to children and youth’s ethical and political aspirations and how they give meaning to their civic engagement. Over the last decades, the ways in which children and youth engage in civic activities have been in motion. An important form of this engagement are personally resonant activities that we call civic projects. Our cultural-historical activity theory analysis of two ongoing civic projects - P365 and Climate Warriors – highlights how the projects emerge and are sustained and developed through the children and youth’s responsible agency as well as the re-mediation of social and material support for the projects.

A contribution to discussions of agency and change from the perspective of cultural-historical activity theory consists of findings on transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS). Aspects of these discussions revolve around the hidden, unrecognized and often suppressed power of hybrid coalitions coming together contribute to making a more just and sustainable world. This chapter presents a theoretical argument supported by empirical examples showing that TADS is intrinsically a power-sensitive conceptualization of agency. The chapter engages in dialogue with and expands on the proposition of power in the sociology of real utopias, arguing that, despite the strong dialectical and progressive stance it adopts, this perspective is still predominantly based on accounts and critiques of how power is played out. A chronological account of two subsequent studies on eradicating homelessness helps construct an expanded proposition in which TADS can serve a key generating and mediating function of power.

In cultural-historical activity theory, the move from orientation to action is connected to the experiencing of contradictions as personally significant conflicts of motives. Our study builds on the theory of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS). We conducted a Change Laboratory intervention with adolescents to support them to work on their motive conflicts and to construct and implement projects they found significant. With the help of Sannino’s model, we analyse the evolution of students’ projects as efforts to move from mental future orientation to practical and material future-making. In our data, the conflict of motives and the creation of second stimuli emerged as the most critical steps in the TADS process. We argue that it is time to make the shift from studying young people’s future orientations as private mental phenomena to fostering and analysing future-making as material public actions that generate use-value and have an impact beyond the individual.

In the USA, Indigenous youth are punished more frequently and severely as compared to their White settler peers. Hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth should be understood in the cultural history of a settler-colonial nation. In this chapter, we present a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in Great Lakes, the state’s education agency, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team. Indigenous Learning Lab including Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, and tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff examined their existing system and designed a culturally responsive behavioral support system. In the following year, the team worked on the implementation of the new system. We utilized transformative agency by double stimulation with a decolonizing approach to facilitate the process. Our decolonizing approach was based on sovereignty and futurity and utilized funds of knowledge in Indigenous communities.

In this chapter we articulate how transformative agency via double stimulation in cultural-historical activity theory can be a form of emancipatory agency from below among those most historically excluded and marginalised. Generated in a six-year-long formative intervention focussing on African land restitution, we show that the emergence of emancipatory transformative agency involves responsive mediation in which second stimuli, suitable to arising contradictions and conflict of motives, need to be co-developed as the formative intervention process unfolds. Emancipatory transformative agency by double stimulation (ETADS) pathways involve complex and parallel forms of movement over time that are not necessarily linear. The chapter reveals that ETADS pathways emerge as communities take ethical-political ownership of co-directing the emancipatory direction of their own development in the formative intervention process. In the process they challenge deep-seated oppressions of longue durée, transform power relations, build intergenerational solidarity and make decisions that advance the common good.

This chapter explores two experiences in which transformative agency and the elaboration of innovative mediating artifacts contributed to change in childbirth care in Brazil. In the first case, we analyze how an organized group of women built cultural tools to expose the excess of cesarean sections in the private health sector, leading to change in regulatory policy. In the second case, we analyze the elaboration of an institutional birth plan model in a formative intervention inspired by the Change Laboratory methodology. Both experiences can be understood as efforts to promote social participation and informed choice, using mediating artifacts to foster agency. The processes ignited by them are also analyzed by the perspective of pedagogy of autonomy as proposed by Freire, in the sense that women are able to build knowledge and act on that knowledge in a meaningful and effective way.

This chapter expands discussion of how to promote transformative agency by double stimulation during a Change Laboratory intervention. The intervention was conducted in an agroecological association, geared toward environmental preservation and social inclusion by strengthening family farming and developing agroforestry systems. The chapter analyzes how motives, movement, and mediation interact in the formation of transformative agency. The results show that through double stimulation, participants transformed the way they understood the origin of their problems. The intervention created a space for reflection in which, with the support of auxiliary instruments, the participants were able to produce a transformative movement, analyzing and understanding the structure of their activity, identifying conflicts of motives, and building a new orientation for the future of the activity. This intervention led to a novel concept of the coordination of the association based on the principle of shared responsibilities, as well as to the construction of a proposal to develop the organization.

This is a study of transformative agency in a formative intervention supporting homelessness workers to cultivate successful innovations presented by their colleagues in five workshops. Transformative agency emerges when mediational means are put into use to solve paralyzing conflicts of motives. The study builds on an activity-theoretical framework merging innovation-related and transformative agency by double stimulation approaches. A qualitative method was specifically created for this study to categorize what we call umbrella innovations and their components as sub- and standalone innovations. The analysis shows that the innovations were linked together to serve as second stimuli, which provided a joint platform for solving conflicts of motives and for expansive peer-learning. The presentations of the innovations during the workshops enabled fruitful movement from limiting situations to future-oriented transformation processes. The expansive peer-learning process pushed the transformative agency formation forward by generating dialogue between participants through questioning and re-defining central issues.

The concept of ‘agency’ demands theorization that captures the dynamic (in-motion) and collective nature (motive orientation) of practice. This chapter follows Edwards’ conceptualisation of relational agency and Stetsenko’s critique of grand narratives of agency, viewing agency as central to relational and transformative practice. Methodologically, the chapter argues in favour of researching incomplete practices in their making or formation rather than complete, fossilised, best practice examples. Data from the initial teacher education programme and teacher sharing meetings show how motive orientation for transformative and responsive professional action takes shape among teachers. It is argued that agentic action is historical and located in the collective system of practice. The findings of the study also put more weight behind arguments that understanding agentic action demands more interrogation of the ‘why’ and ‘where to’ questions of practice; that is, unpacking the ‘motion’ and ‘motive orientation’ of the practice.

This chapter problematises questions of agency, transformation and motives in the context of the exclusion of young people from school. It addresses the question: in what ways might young people be agentic in processes of school exclusion and how might that agency be strengthened? In order to explore this question, the chapter draws on recent developments in cultural-historical theories of transformative agency by double stimulation and Bernsteinian insights on cultural transmission and pedagogy. Empirical data from an exploratory study of permanent school exclusions in a southern English city are used to illustrate the theoretical considerations on transformative agency that are emerging from a four-year multidisciplinary comparative study of exclusion, in all its forms, across the four jurisdictions of the UK. Data are also used to explore the concept of the categorisation of exclusions and in the context of understanding the possibilities for young people’s agency in exclusion.

We need theories that help us join the struggle for alternative futures. Cultural-historical approaches frame agency as something people do rather than something they have or sense. Building on this, I conceptualise agency in terms of the direction and reach of actions. Direction concerns movement from distinctive subject positionings towards desired endpoints. Reach concerns the extent of this movement. Direction and reach can be both outward (transforming the world) and inward (transforming the self). This acknowledges individuals’ contributions to changing their own lives and those of others without evacuating actions from the activities in which they are embedded. Motive, mediation, and motion are key to this. I illustrate these ideas in relation to existing research on young people’s environmental activism, a Latino boy in foster care, and a mother struggling to care for her infant child, as well as examples from prior research and other chapters in this volume.