Lev Vygotsky

Lev (Leon) Semyonovich Vygotsky (Vygotskii) (Russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский; Belarusian: Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі; November 17 [O.S. November 5] 1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Belarusian Jewish developmental psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology.

Biography

Vygotsky (Vygotskii - Russian spelling) was born in 1896 in Orsha, in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). He was influenced by his cousin David Van Gogh and tutored privately by Solomon Ashpiz and Sir Ricky Gold. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1917. Later, he attended the Institute of Psychology in Moscow (1924–34), where he worked extensively on ideas about cognitive development, particularly the relationship of work that is still being explored. He died in Moscow of tuberculosis at the age of 38. Most of his work is still being discovered.

After Vygotsky's death, Sir Ricky Gold sent some of Vygotsky's work to London and Albany. This was groundbreaking in developmental psychology. His daughter and granddaughter are carrying on with his work. Gita L. Vygodskaya is a retired senior research associate at the Academy of Education in Moscow (Daughter of Lev Vygotsky). Elena Kravtsova, (granddaughter of Lev Vygotsky) is the co-director of Project Golden Key. This is an alternative educational approach implemented in more than 30 child centers in Russia. They have both been invited to speak about Vygotsky's continued legacy at the Cognitive Studies Conference at the University of Georgia by the co-director Donna Alvermann.

Work

A pioneering psychologist, Vygotsky was also a highly prolific author: his major works span 6 volumes, written over roughly 10 years, from his Psychology of Art (1925) to Thought and Language [or Thinking and Speech] (1934). Vygotsky's interests in the fields of developmental psychology, child development, and education were extremely diverse. His innovative work in psychology includes several key concepts such as psychological tools, mediation, internalization, and the zone of proximal development. His work covered such diverse topics as the origin and the psychology of art, development of higher mental functions, philosophy of science and methodology of psychological research, the relation between learning and human development, concept formation, interrelation between language and thought development, play as a psychological phenomenon, the study of learning disabilities, and abnormal human development (aka defectology).

Zone of Proximal Development

ZPD is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children. Lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently. The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor. The ZPD captures the child’s cognitive skills that are in the process of maturing and can be accomplished only with the assistance of a more-skilled person. Scaffolding is a concept closely related to the idea of ZPD. Scaffolding is changing the level of support. Over the course of a teaching session, a more-skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current performance. Dialogue is an important tool of this process in the zone of proximal development. In a dialogue unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts of a child are met with the more systematic, logical and rational concepts of the skilled helper.^[1]

Cultural mediation and internalization

Vygotsky investigated child development and how this was guided by the role of culture and interpersonal communication. Vygotsky observed how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually 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, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through which the child derives meaning and affected a child's construction of her/his knowledge. This key premise of Vygotskian psychology is often referred to as cultural mediation. The specific knowledge gained by children through these interactions also represented the shared knowledge of a culture. This process is known as internalization.^[1]

Internalization can be understood in one respect as “knowing how”. For example, riding a bicycle or pouring a cup of milk are tools of the society and initially outside and beyond the child. The mastery of these skills occurs through the activity of the child within society. A further aspect of internalization is appropriation in which the child takes a tool and makes it his own, perhaps using it in a way unique to himself. Internalizing the use of a pencil allows the child to use it very much for his own ends rather than draw exactly what others in society have drawn previously.^[1]

Guided participation, Vygotsky's theory, is practiced around the world. Cultures may differ, though, in the goals of development. For example, Mayan mothers in Guatemala help their daughters learn to weave through guided participation. In the United States and in many other nations, creative thinkers interact with a knowledgeable person rather than by only studying books or by attending classes and exhibits.^[1]

Psychology of play

Lesser known is his research on play, or child's game as a psychological phenomenon and its role in the child's development. Through play the child develops abstract meaning separate from the objects in the world which is a critical feature in the development of higher mental functions.

The famous example Vygotsky gives is of a child who wants to ride a horse but he cannot. As a child under three, he would perhaps cry and be angry, but around the age of three the child's relationship with the world changes, "Henceforth play is such that the explanation for it must always be that it is the imaginary, illusory realization of unrealizable desires. Imagination is a new formation that is not present in the consciousness of the very raw young child, is totally absent in animals, and represents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action." (Vygotsky, 1978)

He wishes to ride a horse but cannot, so he picks up a stick and stands astride of it, thus pretending he is riding a horse. The stick is a pivot. "Action according to rules begins to be determined by ideas, not by objects..... It is terribly difficult for a child to sever thought (the meaning of a word) from object. Play is a transitional stage in this direction. At that critical moment when a stick – i.e., an object – becomes a pivot for severing the meaning of horse from a real horse, one of the basic psychological structures determining the child’s relationship to reality is radically altered".

As children get older, their reliance on pivots such as sticks, dolls and other toys diminishes. They have internalized these pivots as imagination and abstract concepts through which they can understand the world. "The old adage that children’s play is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action" (Vygotsky, 1978).

Another aspect of play that Vygotsky referred to was the development of social rules that develop, for example, when children play house and adopt the roles of different family members. Vygotsky cites an example of two sisters playing at being sisters. The rules of behavior between them that go unnoticed in daily life are consciously acquired through play. As well as social rules the child acquires what we now refer to as self-regulation. For example, as a child stands at the starting line of a running race, she may well desire to run immediately so as to reach the finish line first, but her knowledge of the social rules surrounding the game and her desire to enjoy the game enable her to regulate her initial impulse and wait for the start signal.

Thought and Language

Perhaps Vygotsky's most important contribution concerns the inter-relationship of language development and thought. This concept, explored in Vygotsky's book Thought and Language, (alternative translation: Thinking and Speaking) establishes the explicit and profound connection between speech (both silent inner speech and oral language), and the development of mental concepts and cognitive awareness. It should be noted that Vygotsky described inner speech as being qualitatively different from normal (external) speech. Although Vygotsky believed inner speech to develop from external speech via a gradual process of internalization, with younger children only really able to "think out loud," he claimed that in its mature form it would be unintelligible to anyone except the thinker and would not resemble spoken language as we know it (in particular, being greatly compressed). Hence, thought itself develops socially.^[1]

An infant learns the meaning of signs through interaction with its main care-givers, e.g., pointing, cries, and gurgles can express what is wanted. How verbal sounds can be used to conduct social interaction is learned through this activity, and the child begins to utilize, build, and develop this faculty: using names for objects, etc.^[1]

Language starts as a tool external to the child used for social interaction. The child guides personal behavior by using this tool in a kind of self-talk or "thinking out loud." Initially, self-talk is very much a tool of social interaction and it tapers to negligible levels when the child is alone or with deaf children. Gradually self-talk is used more as a tool for self-directed and self-regulating behavior. Then, because speaking has been appropriated and internalized, self-talk is no longer present around the time the child starts school. Self-talk "develops along a rising not a declining, curve; it goes through an evolution, not an involution. In the end, it becomes inner speech" (Vygotsky, 1987, pg 57). Inner speech develops through its differentiation from social speech.^[1]

Speaking has thus developed along two lines, the line of social communication and the line of inner speech, by which the child mediates and regulates her activity through her thoughts which in turn are mediated by the semiotics (the meaningful signs) of inner speech. This is not to say that thinking cannot take place without language, but rather that it is mediated by it and thus develops to a much higher level of sophistication. Just as the birthday cake as a sign provides much deeper meaning than its physical properties allow, inner speech as signs provides much deeper meaning than the lower psychological functions would otherwise allow.^[1]

Inner speech is not comparable in form to external speech. External speech is the process of turning thought into words. Inner speech is the opposite; it is the conversion of speech into inward thought. Inner speech for example contains predicates only. Subjects are superfluous. Words too are used much more economically. One word in inner speech may be so replete with sense to the individual that it would take many words to express it in external speech.^[1]

Teaching Strategies

Vygotsky’s theory is divided into 6 main strategies, which can be used in the process of learning at school (Santrock, 2004). One way of teaching is by using children’s zone of proximal development. Teaching should begin toward the zone’s upper limit, so that the child can reach the goal with help and move to a higher level of skill and knowledge. Enough assistance should be offered. The question “What can I do to help you?” has to be asked, or simply the child’s intentions and attempts should be observed, so that the child can get enough support in a smooth way. When children hesitate, they have to be offered encouragement. Encouragement should be offered in such a way that the child can practice their skill. Another teaching strategy is to use more-skilled peers as teachers. It is important to remember though that teachers can be more-skilled children. The third strategy is to monitor and encourage children’s use of private speech. The fourth strategy is to effectively assess the child’s ZPD. Standardized tests are not the best way to assess children’s learning. Another good strategy is to place instruction in a meaningful context. This means to use less abstract presentations of material but to let students experience more real-world setting. The last strategy is to transform the classroom with Vygotskian ideas. This means that key element of instruction in this program is the zone of proximal development.^[1]

Influence and development of Vygotsky's ideas

In the Soviet Union, Russia, and Eastern Europe

In the Soviet Union, the work of the group of Vygotsky's students known as the Kharkov School of Psychology was vital for preserving the scientific legacy of Lev Vygotsky and identifying new avenues of its subsequent development. The members of the group laid a foundation for Vygotskian psychology's systematic development in such diverse fields as the psychology of memory (P. Zinchenko), perception, sensation and movement (Zaporozhets, Asnin, A. N. Leont'ev), personality (L. Bozhovich, Asnin, A. N. Leont'ev), will and volition (Zaporozhets, A. N. Leont'ev, P. Zinchenko, L. Bozhovich, Asnin), psychology of play (G. D. Lukov, D. El'konin) and psychology of learning (P. Zinchenko, L. Bozhovich, D. El'konin), as well as the theory of step-by-step formation of mental actions (Gal'perin), general psychological activity theory (A. N. Leont'ev) and psychology of action (Zaporozhets). A.Puzyrey elaborated the ideas of Vygotsky in respect of psychotherapy and even in the broader context of deliberate psychological intervention (psychotechnique), in general. Alexander Zelitchenko developed Vygotsky's ideas in his developmental psychology of nations discovering the mode of historical process creates new mental patterns, including culture-determined modes of thinking.

In the West

In the West, most attention was aimed at the continuing work of Vygotsky's Western contemporary Jean Piaget. 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.

Vygotsky's views are reported to have influenced development of a wide range of psychological and educational theories such as Ecological Systems Theory, activity theory, distributed cognition, cognitive apprenticeship, second language acquisition theory, gesture theory, and narrative therapy. Strong influences of Vygotskian thought can be found in the work of a number of scholars such as Urie Bronfenbrenner, Jerome Bruner^[2], Michael Cole, Andy Clark^[3] James V. Wertsch, Sylvia Scribner, Vera John-Steiner, Ann L. Brown, Courtney Cazden, Gordon Wells, René van der Veer, Jaan Valsiner, Pentti Hakkarainen, Seth Chaiklin, Alex Kozulin, Dorothy Robbins, Nikolai Veresov, Anna Stetsenko, Kieran Egan, Fred Newman, David McNeill, Lois Holzman, and Michael White.^[4][5]

Western scholars have also begun to apply the Vygotskian paradigm to the domain of moral development. In Educational Psychology, first published in English in 1997,Vygotsky devotes a chapter to the discussion of moral development and moral education. Vygotsky viewed moral development as involving similar processes as other areas of cognitive development. Examples of scholars applying Vygotskian theory to moral development include Mark Tappan and Val D. Turner.

Critics of Vygotsky

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The school of Vygotsky and, specifically, his cultural-historical psychology was much criticized during his lifetime as well as after his death. By the beginning of the 1930s, the school was defeated by Vygotsky's scientific opponents who criticized him for "idealist aberrations", which at that time equaled with the charge in disloyalty to the Communist Party and frequently entailed very serious consequences not only for the academic work but also for freedom and even life itself. As a result of this criticism of their work, a major group of Vygotsky's students including Luria and Leontiev had to flee from Moscow to Ukraine where they established the Kharkov school of psychology. Later, the representatives of the school would, in turn, in the second half of the 1930s criticize Vygotsky himself for his interest in the cross-disciplinary study of the child that was developed under the umbrella term of paedology (also spelled as pedology) as well as for his ignoring the role of practice and practical, object-bound activity and arguably his emphasis on the research on the role of language and, on the other hand, emotional factors in human development. Much of this early criticism of the 1930s was later discarded by these Vygotskian scholars themselves. Another line of the critique of Vygotsky's psychological theory comes from such major figures of the Soviet psychology as Sergei Rubinstein and his followers who criticized Vygotsky's notion of mediation and its development in the works of students.

Some critics say Vygotsky overemphasized the role of language in thinking. Also, his emphasis on collaboration and guidance has potential pitfalls if facilitators are too helpful in some cases. An example of that would be an overbearing and controlling parent. Other critics argue that some children may become lazy and expect help when they can do something on their own.^[1]

See also

Social constructivism

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Santrock, J (2004). A Topical Approach To Life-Span Development. Chapter 6 Cognitive Development Approaches (200 – 225). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
2. ^ Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3. ^ Clark, A. (1998). Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation. Carruthers, P. and Boucher, J. (Eds). Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
4. ^ White, M. (2006). Narrative practice with families and children: Externalising conversations revisited. In M. White & A. Morgan, (2006). Narrative therapy with children and their families, pp. 1-56. Adelaide, South Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.
5. ^ White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. New York: W.W. Norton.

Secondary literature

Major monographs about Vygotsky's Work

• Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London.
• Kozulin, A. (1990). Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Lee, C. D., & Smagorinsky, P. (Editors) (2000). Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky. A quest for synthesis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Newman, F. & Holzman, L. (1993). Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary scientist. London: Routledge.
• Van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.) (1994). The Vygotsky Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Daniels, H. (Ed.) (1996). An Introduction to Vygotsky, London: Routledge.
• Cole, M. & Wertsch, J. (1996). Contemporary Implications of Vygotsky and Luria, Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
• Vygodskaya, G. L., & Lifanova, T. M. (1996/1999). Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, Part 1, 37 (2), 3-90; Part 2, 37 (3), 3-90; Part 3, 37 (4), 3-93, Part 4, 37 (5), 3-99.
• Veresov, N. N. (1999). Undiscovered Vygotsky: Etudes on the pre-history of cultural-historical psychology. New York: Peter Lang.
• Daniels, H., Wertsch, J. & Cole, M. (Eds.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky
• Van der Veer, Rene (2007). Lev Vygotsky: Continuum Library of Educational Thought. Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-8409-3. 

Vygotsky's texts online

In English

• Lev Vygotsky archive @ marxists.org: all major works

In Russian

• Психология искусства (1922)
• Сознание как проблема психологии поведения (1924/5)
• Исторический смысл психологического кризиса (1927)
• Проблема культурного развития ребенка (1928)
• Орудие и знак в развитии ребенка (1930)
• История развития высших психических функций (1931)
• Лекции по психологии (1. Восприятие; 2. Память; 3. Мышление; 4. Эмоции; 5. Воображение; 6. Проблема воли) (1932)
• Проблема развития и распада высших психических функций (1934)
• Мышление и речь (idem, idem, idem) (1934)
• Конкретная психология человека

In French

• Miffre, Dr. Léon. Se former avec Vygotski. Nouvelle formation des professeurs des écoles. Compétences. Mastérisation (Training with Vygotsky. New teacher training schools. Skills. Master). Editions Je Publie, 4e édition, 2009, [1].

External links

• Documentary:One man's legacy through his life and theory Produced by Valerie Lowe Includes interviews and commentary by family members and renowned professors, archive photos, film footage and Vygotskian practice examples.
• The Vygotsky Project Summaries of, and links to, Vygotsky articles.
• Vygotsky Centennial Project Collected articles exploring Vygotsky's work.
• The Mozart of Psychology Vygotsky article with extensive references.
• Dorothy "Dot" Robbins Vygotsky memorial site with many papers and resources.
• East Side Institute Vygotsky-inspired research and training center in NYC.
• XMCA Research Paper Archive Various articles on Vygotskian psychology
• Garai, L. Another crisis in the psychology: A possible motive for the Vygotsky-boom.
• Garai, L. Vygotskian implications: On the meaning and its brain
• Sociocultural Theory wiki, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Video about Vygotsky
• Vygotsky's Developmental Theory: An Introduction 4-minute clip from a documentary film used primarily in higher education.
• Annotated bibliography of scholarly histories on Vygotsky, Advances in the History of Psychology, York University
• http://www.uga.edu/columns/102797/bboard.html