Who and What: Vygotsky and His Ideas

Who and What: Vygotsky and His Ideas

Vygotsky was a product of his time: an intellectual, a Jew, a true polymath who took as much pleasure in thinking through the intricacies of speech impediments and language acquisition as he did in contemplating Shakespeare's Hamlet or the psychology of art. His ideas spanned the usual disciplinary boundaries seemingly without effort, and his ability to think creatively in several fields and contribute at a high level in each of them has continued to intrigue scholars who have examined his work. While he was interested in problems of education and development, and while it is on those fields that his work is still studied most intensively today (perhaps also including the psychology of mental dysfunction -- retardation and schizophrenia), he was not viewed in his own time (and most likely did not view himself) as an "educational psychologist." He was, instead, a psychologist, critic, intellectual, and social activist whose work happened to touch intensively on education.

In American educational psychology, Vygotsky is remembered most commonly in connection with his notion of the "zone of proximal educational development" (sometimes the ZPD, ZoPED, or simply "the Zone"). Crudely put, the idea is that children develop by encountering concepts or tasks that lie beyond their immediate ability to accomplish, but which are within a "zone" of possible performance that may be realized if the child works along with an adult. For Vygotsky, the ZPD was specifically observable in situations where a young person's naive or individual notions of the world and its functions come into contact with an adult's more organized and "scientific" ideas, but in later Western discussions and interpretations, this focus on the interplay between pre-scientific and scientific worldviews came to be submerged under a general image of the interplay between adult and childish conceptions as aids to development.

Other aspects of Vygotsky's work have been especially interesting to Russian educators. The notion of development as growing out of the interaction of humans with one another, especially the interaction of adults and children, offers a distinctively collectivist vision of human psychological growth, substantially different from Western (and particularly American) ideas of radical individualism (i.e., behaviorism) and pre-determined stages of psycho-physiological growth (à la Piaget). In Vygotsky's conception, psychology cannot be viewed as separate from the twin concomitants of human history and human culture. In particular, Vygotsky saw the primary psychological tasks of childhood as being encounters with and learning how to assimilate and use the intellectual and cognitive "tools" developed by humans over the centuries -- language, mathematics, music and art, and so on. Absorbing the laws, conventions, ways of working with ideas and problems in the world that these tools afford are essential to becoming an educated person, a full human being, and Vygotsky was essentially interested in the processes that facilitated acquiring these tools, as well as in processes that inhibited or prevented one from acquiring them. For Vygotsky, the place where these processes came together was in education, whether defined as formal schooling or less formal encounters with an educative purpose.

Other aspects of Vygotsky's work have been developed and featured by those of his "school" -- the psychologists Luria, Elkonin, Leont'ev, and more recently Davydov and Zinchenko. Of particular importance here is the notion of "activity theory," an extension of the idea of the ZPD to encompass more sorts of interpersonal activity in more different kinds of settings, often very specific situations in which problems of a particular sort are presented to students, and in which they have to work collaboratively to try to solve them. Much of the work has been done with mathematics, although there are also examples in the sciences (especially physics), literature, and history.

These ideas may seem innocuous enough, but in their time they were seen as inflammatory and dangerous to the Soviet state. As Vasily Davydov, one of the current school of Vygotsky followers recounts from his own days as a student of psychology in Moscow in the mid-1950s, "To look at Vygotsky's book Pedagogical Psychology, one had to have a special pass from the KGB that would admit one to the restricted reading room in the Lenin Library where the book could be read" (Davydov, 1993). In the mid 1930s, Vygotsky was associated with the failed "pedology" movement among Soviet educators and psychologists, a movement that (because of its interest in Western notions of ability testing and examination of individual differences) was ruled bourgeois and anti-Soviet. Vygotsky himself died in 1934, and his works were generally unavailable until several years after the death of Stalin. Even then, educational dictionaries and encyclopedias treated his ideas gingerly, and described them as "mistaken" or as having been "subjected to wide criticism." While students were introduced to his work in pedagogical institutes, it was always through second-hand sources, and never in great depth. Graduate students and researchers, however, paid more attention, and by the 1970s there was a thriving group of scholars and educators using his ideas as guides for practice. (For other treatments in English of Vygotsky's work and influence, see Kozulin, 1990, and Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991).

The work of Vygotsky was brought more forcefully to public attention with the advent of perestroika. As old strictures fell away, those in the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (principally Davydov and Zinchenko, but also others) with an interest in Vygotsky's work began to proselytize more openly. At the same time, the educational "young Turks" among the publicists, journalists, teacher-innovators, and intellectuals sought to crystallize their interests and their newly discovered common views of the problems besetting the Soviet school system. At a meeting of the "teacher-innovators" in Peredelkino outside of Moscow in October, 1986, the notion of a "pedagogy of collaboration" (pedagogika sotrudnichestva) was put forward as an intellectual "glue" to unite the diverse approaches an interests of the reformers. The ideas of Vygotsky, particular the importance of the "cultural-historical" approach in psychology generally, and of the centrality of interaction among adult and children for humane personal development, were central to the formation of this vision.

As the movement developed, and its fortunes rose and fell, the ideas of Vygotsky have continued to play a central role in Russian efforts to restructure schools, provide an educational psychology more in tune with the needs of the individual and less focused on the needs of the state, and create new models of pedagogy that allow teachers to play more varied roles in the classroom. There have been numerous academic conferences devoted to his work and his legacy, several centers and laboratories named after him, and a major national educational association (the International Association for Developmental Teaching [razvivaiushchee obuchenie]) formed on the basis of his ideas and work. (For discussions of the development of the "social-pedagogical movement" in the former USSR, see Eklof & Dneprov, 1993; Johnson, 1997; Jones, 1994; and Kerr, 1990).



Reference : http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/vygotsky/