Course 3506

Lev Vygotsky

Although Lev Vygotsky put forth his ideas in Russia in the 1920s, many of his ideas remain fresh and influential. Vygotsky put more emphasis on the importance of culture and social interaction in the developmental process than did Piaget. (This is not to imply that Piaget thought culture and social interaction to be insignificant.) Vygotsky also believed that language had an important role in development and he introduced the idea of the zone of proximal development. He saw tools as means to understand the world. Material tools are developed within cultures to enable people to accomplish tasks. Computers, hammers, and bulldozers are material tools. We use psychological tools as well. Language and mathematics are large-scale psychological tools while symbols and social conventions are also psychological tools. Thus alphabets, mathematical and chemical symbols as well as rules such as raising your hand to indicate a desire to speak are psychological tools that you would find in school classrooms.

It is in our cultures -- homes, schools, meeting places, places of worship, places of entertainment -- that we learn how to use the material and psychological tools available to us. Most of this learning occurs with no formal instruction. We see what others do and follow their leads. In this way, adults and more competent peers serve as intellectual guides and lead us on to further cognitive development. This process has been referred to as scaffolding in the sense that the culture and social interactions within it form a framework. Based on that framework, we construct our understanding of the world and a conceptual foundation upon which we can build further understanding in new situations.

Vygotsky made the contention that Any higher mental function necessarily goes through an external stage in its development because it is initially a social function. Once a mental function, or a concept , has been culturally and socially negotiated, it becomes available to be internalized. That is, it becomes a part of or a possession of an individual. This view of the initial social nature of learning is in some ways at odds with how development is commonly viewed in North American culture. Here we put heavy emphasis on the individual which can lead us to believe that development is entirely an individual matter. Vygotsky gives us reason to question this. If he is correct, many of the ways that we, as North Americans, view development may be detrimental to achieving understanding of the process.

Internalization of our learning and development becomes involved with language. Not only is language important as a means of communication through which we can be influenced by our culture, but it is also valuable for planning of actions. We use a sort of inner speech to guide ourselves through the execution of complex procedures for accomplishing tasks or for figuring out ways to combine old procedures to produce new ones. This may become observable when we start to talk aloud to ourselves in working out a procedure. This is evidence that we have internalized a process.

Of course, some of us think about the ways things have been done and come up with new ways of doing those things. Part of this process of change may involve the invention of new tools. Since cultures are not static, our tool use is not static. Cultures create tools and those tools, in turn, change cultures in a continuing interaction.

The best known of Vygotsky's ideas is that of the zone of proximal development. Vygotsky said that we have zones of capability. There is a zone of things which we are capable of doing. We need no help with those things. There is a zone of things which we are incapable of doing (at least for the present) no matter how much help is given to us. Between these lies the zone of proximal development. Therein lies a set of things which we can't do on our own, but which we can do with some assistance and/or guidance. Obviously, this is a crucially important zone for teachers to understand for it is our job to provide the assistance and guidance which leads to further development. It is important to be able to determine what kind of help a student needs. Too advanced an explanation will be of no use, but on the other hand, performing the task for the student does not aid development. I have noticed that students trying to learn calculus may not actually have problems with the ideas of the calculus. Their problems may be at the level of the algebraic manipulations which are used in developing the formulas used in calculus. Concentrating on the abstract ideas of the calculus may be of no help to a student who is struggling to follow the algebraic steps used in the argument. I think of this as being unable to see the calculus forest because of the algebraic trees.

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