#3quotes from Vygotsky

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky is revered as a notable pioneer of research into learning and cognitive development. Although his writings were suppressed in the West for several decades, they eventually emerged in the 70s, representative of a progressive view of constructivism, in which the social was seen as a major influence on learning.

His seminal work Mind in Society (1978) has been widely cited although not widely read, but it is important to draw Vygotsky's ideas from their origin. Here are three key quotes directly taken from Mind in Society and some of my interpretation of their meaning and context:

"...learning as it occurs in the preschool years differs markedly from school learning, which is concerned with the assimilation of the fundamentals of scientific knowledge. [...] Learning and development are interrelated from the child's very first days of life." (p 84)

Here, Vygotsky is concerned with the whole development of the child, viewing schooling as a formal stage but not the entire story of a child's development. He saw children as individuals and unique in their abilities and levels of maturity. Perhaps his most famous contribution to our understanding of learning - the zone of proximal development (ZPD) - is seen by Vygotsky as a tool to differentiate between individual states of development. Often the ZPD is viewed as a means to standardise education, but Vygotsky never intended this. He writes:

"...the zone of proximal development permits us to delineate the child's immediate future and his dynamic developmental state, allowing not only for what already has been achieved developmentally but also for what is in the course of maturing." (p 87)

Vygotsky goes on to describe two children who were identical in age and developmental level, but whose developmental dynamics were entirely different. Finally, Vygotsky emphasises the social contexts for learning at all levels and implies the important role teachers can play:

"Every function of a child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals." (p 57)

From this statement we can envisage a useful, pragmatic perspective on the central role of teachers.  Although they are there to teach, within this role is the need to reach out to the child, placing importance on relationship formation. Children learn better when they develop a connection with their teachers - and this is a vital factor at all levels of education.

Reference
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Previous posts in the #3quotes series
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
John Dewey


#3quotes from Vygotsky by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.