Lecture Notes – Lev Vygotsky
There are very few photographs of Lev Vygotsky. He didn’t live very long (he was 38 when he died), and he was ill with tuberculosis for several years before his death. In spite of his short career, Lev Vygotsky’s theory started nothing short of a revolution in psychology, education, and in child development—once his work was translated in to English, that is. Unfortunately, that didn’t begin to happen until the 70s, with Mind in Society.
The first time I ever heard of Lev Vygotsky was my first year of graduate school. I was taking my first class on theories of development. The professor who taught the class was an enormous fan of this theory, and she assigned the book to us as a reading (our reading load was pretty heavy). She did so, of course, because she wanted us to have the same experience she did when she first read the book. She was an undergraduate student, randomly looking through books at the library, and happened to come across Mind in Society. She started reading it, and simply could not put it down. I think it’s pretty safe to say that experience helped to shape the course of her professional life. Now, I’d like to tell you I had the same experience when I read this book, but I found it to be a somewhat difficult read. I had to read parts more than once. I had to talk about it with my classmates, who of course all grumbled about the amount of readings (some things never change). But that professor, along with the exposure I got to Vygotsky’s theory, also helped to change the course of my own academic and professional life. I began to see development as inextricably tied to environmental context—and also to its social and cultural context. Piaget made an enormous contribution to child development, but as we noted previously, there were some limitations (as there are with all theories) because his theory was based in Western Rationalism, which is not the only philosophical orientation used by people to understand the world. With Vygotsky, we get a glimpse of the world from a more Eastern perspective—one that emphasizes the connectedness of people and things, one that does not simply view cognition as something that exists within the mind of one individual.
What if cognition also exists between people? Think about it—is there anything that you’ve ever learned truly on your own? Without the language that you learned from interactions with other people, without the reading ability that was taught to you, without the book that someone else wrote? Tools that someone else invented and manufactured? No, of course not. Our thoughts have been so shaped by our past and present interactions with people and with what Vygotsky called “cultural tools” (like the computer I’m using right now), that it is impossible to really separate one from the other. What a revolutionary idea. When I first began to realize the implications of this idea, when I first really and truly got it, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I knew I was onto an idea that was a good fit for me, certainly, and one that could explain the relationship between learning and development in a way that had never been done before.
Are you exited yet? Vygotsky had that influence on people when he was alive (his biographers have described his influence as messianic; students would sit outside windows and in the halls just to hear him speak). Once his work was translated and read by people worldwide, this influence and loyal following continued to spread. People who like Vygotsky are kind of like loyal psychoanalysts—they like “their theory” a lot. People like Michael Cole and Barbara Rogoff continue to conduct research with this theoretical orientation, and they continue to develop the theory. If you’re interested in reading more about Sociocultural Theory, those would be good authors to use in a search (in addition to Vygotsky himself, of course).
Let’s get back to the idea of the relationship between social interactions and cognition. The idea that learning and cognition are related to each other served as the premise for Vygotsky’s theory—in fact, it is the mechanism of change (which of course, all good developmental theories ought to have). He called this the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)—basically, the gap between what a learner can do by himself (no assistance) and what he cannot do even with assistance. In between is the “zone”—that teachable area where, with assistance (a.k.a. scaffolding)., a learner (child) can move up to a higher level of functioning. It’s called the zone of proximal development because the focus is on emerging capacities that are just beyond the learner’s ability to perform independently. The ZPD, therefore, is not static. It changes over time just as individuals change over time. Thus, teaching and development are really part of the same process—learning helps to drive development, which helps to promote learning. Here’s a graphic to illustrate the ZPD concept:
Note: Those of you who took my Culture, Ethnicity, and the Family class know I actually have a better graphic than this, but it’s in the office. I think this does basically get to the point, though.
Four-Stage Process of ZPD
Vygotsky (1978) believed that "what the child [or learner] is able to do in collaboration today, he will be able to do independently tomorrow." Tharp & Gallimore (1988) described the ZPD as a four-stage process:
Above: Modified version of Tharp & Gallimore's
Four-Stage Model of ZPD (graphics added)
· Stage 1: Assistance provided by more knowledgeable others (MKO's) (Think of a child learning to tie his shoes, first, you show him how, then you talk him through it, usually with some little memorable story about rabbit ears, loops or something like that, and eventually…
· Stage 2: Assistance provided by self (the child is able to guide himself through tying his shoes, usually repeating the story that you taught him—the interaction has become internalized. Children often talk themselves through difficult tasks—Vygotsky called this private speech. You’ll notice that this private speech is generally pretty close to directions provided by MKO’s.)
· Stage 3: Automatization through practice (With practice, tasks become less difficult, so we no longer have to talk to ourselves through them. What began as an interaction becomes an effortless, almost automatic behavior. The “private speech” becomes more internalized—it “goes underground,” and it only arises again when we are faced with another challenging task.)
· Stage 4: De-automatization; recursiveness through previous three stages (If time goes by and you don’t use a skill—say, you switch to all Velcro shoes as a child--it gets harder again. Then you have to go through stages 1 – 3 again. Even if you continue to practice a skill, it is often necessary to go through the ZPD stages again when planning to use that skill in a new way or in combination with other skills.)
The successful application of Vygotsky's theory requires a learning environment dedicated to these principles. Those acting as MKO's must be highly involved, must work in collaboration with their students to facilitate learning, and must be famililar with the students' individual ZPD's. This is in contrast to some traditional teaching methods that require students to simply regurgitate recited material. Remember that, like Piaget’s theory, Vygotsky’s theory is a constructivist theory (social constructivist, actually). All learners are active learners, and they seek out the kind of interactions that will aid them in their learning. Both Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories suggest that a more collaborative environment may encourage students to create their own meanings and apply them to learned material (Hausfather, 1996).
In terms of explaining cross-cultural variations in learning, Vygotsky’s theory has an advantage—the kinds of interactions, cultural tools, and learning experiences that children encounter will obviously differ from one context to the next. This, of course, will explain why children in one context may have difficulty with a cognitive task while children in a different context may not (this includes but is not exclusive to variations in cultural context—sometimes experience with different materials or comfort with a certain situation may be the determining factor). Many of the skills Piaget was interested in are much more context dependent that he first believed they would be. Together, Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories give us a very good foundation for understanding cognitive development and for shaping educational practice with learners of all ages.
Lagniappe:
More on Scaffolding (implications for educational practice)
Vygotsky and Language Acquisition