Why Vygotsky ? (Overview)

In the mid-1980s, at the gloaming of the Communist epoch, there emerged in Russian education a group of teachers, scholars, and intellectuals intent on remaking the schools in a new and different image. The "social-pedagogical movement," as its founders came to describe it, grew out of a diverse set of circumstances -- the work of academic psychologists and social psychologists who studied the increasingly dysfunctional ways in which teachers and students interacted in schools, the "organizational-activity games" of clinical psychologist-practitioners who worked with entire cities and regions to chart institutional and social problems, the critical stance of journalists who saw the personal ruin created in many schools by thoughtless and authoritarian teachers, and the seminars, workshops and demonstrations staged by an intrepid group of "teacher-innovators" around the country. The movement flourished, contracted, transmuted itself through several incarnations, and remains a potent force for renewal in Russian education today.

Underlying the very different experiences and outlooks of those involved, however, is a single conceptual and intellectual thread: the work of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, a psychologist who lived and worked in the early years of the twentieth century. At in-service training programs for teachers, scientific conferences, and meetings of the Collegium of the Ministry of Education, citations of and attributions to the work of L. S. Vygotsky have become an expected part of the intellectual background of discourse about Russian education today. Why Vygotsky's ideas, banished for many years under the Soviet regime, came to play such a central role in the attempts to renew Russian education, and what the implications of Vygotskian psychology may be for future developments in education, are the themes of this paper.

By Stephen T. KerrUniversity of Washington