Mediating self-regulation in kindergarten classrooms: an exploratory case study of early childhood education in South Africa Giulietta Harrison and Azwihangwisi Muthivhi Abstract This article examines the role preschool teachers could play in mediating self-regulation among preschoolers. It is based on a case study which probed how a teacher’s mediation promoted cognitive and emotional development of preschoolers between the ages of 4-6, and facilitated the acquisition of self-regulation. This case study, informed by Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of learning and development, involved the teacher mediating self-regulatory processes through facilitating role-play (or what could be termed ‘fantasy play’) by providing models of appropriate dialogue structure to preschoolers, as well as strategies for organisational and problem-solving skills. The teacher, researching her own teaching-intervention, using theory-informed teaching strategies, found that preschoolers achieved significant cognitive shifts towards mastering self-regulative forms of thinking. This was manifested through children’s greater awareness of own thoughts, talking systematically about their thinking as to what processes were involved during solving specific problems or in planning for how a solution could be achieved. Preschoolers who had initially – during pre-mediation activities – revealed impulsive and egocentric modes demonstrated, during post-mediation activities, greater awareness and mastery of their own thinking. This case study has crucial importance for how preschoolers could be prepared in early learning and preschool classes for productive, developmentally-oriented forms of learning that foster more reflective and analytic forms of thinking. Introduction Early childhood education and specifically; school readiness, is a subject that has not received much attention in South African research and little is known about the modes of activities and thought processes that dominate children at preschool level and how these could effectively articulate with formal