Introduction: The Construct of Educational Self Giuseppina Marsico and Luca Tateo The Reason of the Book This work originates from a long-lasting dissatisfaction of the authors with the current scenario of educational psychology. We are observing a trend towards an individ- ualistic view of educational processes, an instrumentalist idea of learning/teaching and an organicist and maturationist view of human development (Marsico 2017, Valsiner 2009a, b; Valsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato, & Dazzani, 2016). We are dissatisfied with a view of development as progressive reduction of uncertainty and the idea of education as acquisition of transferable skills. We are dissatisfied with the assumptions of learning/ teaching as an accountable and visible achievement of pre-determined steps. Following a long tradition, that dates back to J. M. Baldwin, H. Werner, L. S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget, just to name few, we think that develop- mental processes are future-oriented and value-constrained unfolding of potential forms (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014). In Fig. 1, Valsiner and van der Veer (2014) very clearly elaborate on the concept of Zone of Proximal Development, showing how the exact location in which psychology can find and study development is the in-between old and neo-formations. Developmental and educational psychology are indeed “blind to the study of development by eliminating developmental phenomena at the outset—through treat- ing the fuzzy “borders zones” between A and B as an “error” ” (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2014, p. 152). Many current educational theories—such as visible learning (Hattie, 2008), problem-based learning (Dolmans, Loyens, Marcq, & Gijbels, 2016), or self-regulated learning (Zimmerman & Schunk 2013)—cannot deal with this fun- G. Marsico (B ) University of Salerno, Pontecagnano, SA, Italy e-mail: pina.marsico@gmail.com L. Tateo Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: luca@hum.aau.dk © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 G. Marsico and L. Tateo (eds.), The Emergence of Self in Educational Contexts, Cultural Psychology of Education 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98602-9_1 1