Lev Vygotsky

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Лев Семенович Выготский) (November 17 (November 5 Old Style), 1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet developmental psychologist whose work received widespread recognition in the Western world in the 1960s as English translations appeared. According to Vygotsky, the intellectual development of children is a function of human communities, rather than of individuals. His contributions are widely respected and influential within the fields of developmental psychology, education, and child development.

Biography

He was born in Orsha, Belarus (then Russian empire) and grew up in Homel (southern Belarus) in a prosperous Jewish family. Vygotsky attended Moscow University, majoring in law. He graduated in 1918 and returned to Homel where he worked as a school teacher and studied. In 1924 he moved to Moscow, working on a diverse set of projects. He died of tuberculosis in 1934, leaving a wealth of work that is still being explored.

Work

Vygotsky's work includes several key concepts:

the zone of proximal development,
scaffolding,
psychological tools
mediation,
internalization, etc.

and covers such diverse topics as the origin and the development of higher mental functions, philosophy of science and methodology of psychological research, the relation between learning and human development, concept formation, language and thought, psychology of art, play as a psychological phenomenon, the study of learning disabilities and abnormal human development (aka defectology), etc.

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which relates to the gap or difference between child's existing abilities and what she/he can learn with the guidance of an adult or a more capable peer. While commonly quoted by educators, the ZPD is still not widely used the way in which Vygotsky initially presented the idea, specifically how it relates to assessment.

The Zone of proximal development uses two levels to gauge a child's ability and potential. A child's actual development level is when he or she can work unaided on a task or problem. This sets a baseline for the child's knowledge and is traditionally what is assessed and valued in schools. The Potential development level is the level of competence a child can reach when he or she is guided and supported by another person. The difference between these two levels of ability consist of the ZPD. This idea of a significant adult guiding a child through the ZPD is known as scaffolding. This concept has been further developed by Jerome Bruner and influenced his related concept of instructional scaffolding.

Thought and language

Another important Vygotsky contribution concerns the inter-relationship of language development and thought. This concept, explored in Vygotsky's book Thought and Language, establishes the explicit and profound connection between speech, (both silent inner speech and oral language) and the development of mental concepts and cognitive awareness metacognition.

It is through inner speech and oral languge Vygotsky argued, that thoughts and mental constructs (a child's intellectual being) are formed. A child's conscious awareness of these and their being impressed upon the human psyche provide an underlying theoretical rationale for such truisms as:
"If you want to learn something, teach it to someone",
"the one who does the talking, does the learning",
"I talked myself into it";
and the observations of our need to "talk it out" and "think out loud."

Psychology of play

Lesser known, but a direct correlate to the ZPD and of utmost importance to Vygotsky, was his concept of play. Play was a moment where social rules were put into practice - a horse would behave as horse even though it was a stick. These types of rules always guided a child's play. Vygotsky even once described two sisters at dinner "playing" at being sisters at dinner. Vygotsky believed that play contained all developmental levels in a condensed form. Therefore, to Vygotsky, play was akin to imagination where a child extends her/himself to the next level of her/his normal behavior, thereby creating a zone of proximal development for her/himself. In essence, Vygotsky believed "play is the source of development." Psychology of play was later developed by Vygotsky's student Daniil El'konin.

Cultural mediation and internalization

In addition to these ideas, Vygotsky also forwarded the notion that culture and community play a huge role in early development. Vygotsky is well-known for his model being termed sociocultural approach. For him, a child's development is a direct result of her/his culture. For Vygotsky, development applied primarily to mental development, such as thought, language, reasoning processes and mental functions. However, Vygotsky observed that these abilities developed through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults. Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, namely speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge that effected a child's construction of her/his knowledge. The specific knowledge gained by a child through these interactions also represented the shared knowledge of a culture. This process is known as internalization.

Influence and development of Vygotsky's ideas

In the Soviet Union, the ideas of Vygotsky were developed largely under the banner of activity theory that was introduced and systematically developed by such Vygotsky's students and colleagues as Alexei Leont'ev, P. Zinchenko, Zaporozhets, D. El'konin, as well as Gal'perin, Davydov, Smirnov, Talyzina, etc.

In the West, most attention was aimed at the continuing work of Vygotsky's Western contemporary Jean Piaget. Early - albeit indirectly - influence on growing the cognitive science community in the United States was already apparent in the late 1950s and early 1960s through the work of Vygotsky's student and collaborator Alexander Luria which was read by early pioneers of cognitive science J. S. Bruner and George Miller. However, Vygotsky's work appeared virtually unknown until its "rediscovery" in the 1960s, when the interpretative translation of Thought and language (1934) was published in English (in 1962; revised edition in 1986, translated by A. Kozulin and, as Thinking and speech, in 1987, translated by N. Minick). In the end of the 1970s, truly ground-breaking publication was the major compilation of Vygotsky's works that saw the light in 1978 under the header of Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.

By the 1980s, Vygotsky's work became well known in the United States in part due to the opening of the Soviet Union due to glasnost. Vygotsky's work became extremely influential because it offered a way of reconciling the competing notions of maturation by which a child is seen as an unfolding flower best left to develop on his or her own, and environmentalism, in which a child is seen as a blank slate onto which must be poured knowledge. His views are influential on activity theory, distributed cognition, and Cognitive Apprenticeships.

Works of Vygotsky are also studied today by linguists regarding language and its influence on the formation of the perception of reality. His work has also been influential on second language acquisition theory.

Vygotsky's texts online

Lev Vygotsky archive @ marxists.org.uk: all major works (in English)
Lev Vygotsky's Psychology of Art (in Russian)

External links

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