EDUCATORS
Lev S. Vygotsky1 (1896 - 1934)
Ivan Ivic 2
The scientific work of Lev S. Vygotsky has had a
remarkable destiny. The man himself, one of
the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century, never received any
formal training in
psychology. His death at the age of 37 put an end to his research after
only ten years or so, and
he did not see the publication of his most important works. And yet this
‘Mozart of psychology’
(as the philosopher S. Toulmin called him) constructed one of the most
promising theories in
psychology. More than fifty years after his death, now that his major
works have been published,
Vygotsky has become an avant-garde writer. According to one of his best
exponents, ‘There is no doubt that, in many respects, Vygotsky is far
ahead of our own time’ (Rivière, 1984, p. 120). Such a phenomenon, so
rare in the history of science, may perhaps be explained by two closely
connected factors: first, the scope and originality of his scientific
writings over a relatively short period offer clear proof of his genius.
Second, he was working at a time of dramatic historical change, namely
the October Revolution in Russia. At the heart of the psychological
system constructed by Vygotsky we find an ontogenetic theory of mental
development that is also in many aspects a historical theory of
individual development. In other words, it is a genetic conception of a
genetic phenomenon. No doubt there is an epistemological lesson to be
drawn from this: it would seem that historical periods of revolutionary
change sharpen the sensitivity of human thought and predispose it in
favour of everything that concerns genesis, transformation, dynamic
evolution and the future.
The life and work of Vygotsky
Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was born at Orsha, a small town in Belarus, on
17 November 1896.
After attending the gymnasium at Gomel, he began his university studies
in law, philosophy and
history at Moscow in 1912. His school and university education provided
him with an excellent
training in the humanities—language and linguistics, aesthetics and
literature, philosophy and
history. At the early age of 20 he wrote a voluminous study on
Hamlet. He displayed a lively
interest in poetry, drama, language and questions of signs and meaning,
the theory of literature,
the cinema, and the issues of history and philosophy, long before he
began his research in
psychology. It is important to note that the first book by Vygotsky,
which was to point him once
and for all towards psychology, was The Psychology of Art,
published in 1925.
An interesting parallel can be drawn with Jean
Piaget. They were born in the same year, and neither received any formal
training in psychology; like Piaget, Vygotsky became the author
of a remarkable theory of mental development. From adolescence onwards
throughout his long
life, however, Piaget was attracted by biology, and this difference in
inspiration may account for
the difference between two important paradigms in developmental
psychology: Piaget placed the
emphasis on structural aspects and on the essentially universal laws (of
biological origin) of
development, whereas Vygotsky stressed the contribution of culture,
social interaction and the
historical dimension of mental development.
After university Vygotsky returned to Gomel, where he engaged in a wide variety of intellectual activities. He taught psychology, began to take an interest in the problems of handicapped children and continued his study of the theory of literature and the psychology of art. After his first professional successes in psychology (papers submitted to national congresses), in 1924 he settled in Moscow and began work at the Institute of Psychology. It was there that Vygotsky, surrounded by fellow workers as passionately interested as himself in a thorough reconstruction of psychology, created in one prodigious decade (1924-34) his historical-cultural theory of psychological phenomena.
The essential writings and professional activities of Vygotsky, long neglected, have only recently been gradually rediscovered and reconstituted. The interested reader can now find them in the following works: Levitin (1982), Luria (1979), Mecacci (1983), Rivière (1984), Schneuwly and Bronckart (1985), Valsiner (1988) and, of course, in the six-volume collection of works by Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1982-84).
In the course of those few years of research
Vygotsky wrote some 200 works, a number
of which have been lost. The principal source remains his Complete
Works, published in Russian
between 1982 and 1984; despite its title, however, this does not contain
all his writings that have
been preserved, and several of his previously published books and
articles have not yet been
reissued.
The most complete bibliography of the works of Vygotsky, together with a list of translations and studies on him, is to be found in the sixth volume of the Complete Works and in Schneuwly and Bronckart (1985). It should be noted in passing that certain presentations of Vygotsky, particularly some of those in English, have been rather unfortunate and, in particular, have occasioned many misunderstandings. This is especially true of the highly distorted presentation in English of Vygotsky’s most important work Thought and Language, published in 1962. It is to be hoped that the editions of the Complete Works currently being prepared in several languages (English, Italian, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, etc.) will help foreign scholars to gain a more accurate understanding of Vygotsky’s real thinking. The bibliographical data in the original version of the Complete Works, together with the commentaries to be found in each volume, will, moreover, make it easier to reconstruct the origin and growth of his ideas. Such a reconstruction will, among other things, make for a sounder interpretation of his thinking, particularly those ideas that were formulated in various ways in works written at different times.
Be this as it may, there will always remain a further difficulty for readers unable to study the texts of Vygotsky in Russian: in creating an original theoretical system, Vygotsky at the same time invented a terminology that was capable of expressing the new approach. In consequence, any translation runs the risk of distorting those ideas, at least to some extent.
From the corpus of Vygotsky’s ideas we shall attempt here a brief analysis of those that are relevant to education, leaving aside his thinking concerning the methodology of science, general psychology, the psychology of art, handicapped children, etc. Our discussion will therefore concentrate on two points: the educational implications of Vygotsky’s theory of mental ontogenesis; and the analysis of his strictly and explicitly educational ideas.
The interpretations offered are, needless to say, our own. Having long
studied the texts of
Vygotsky we shall, rather than reproduce his words, attempt to capture
the deeper meaning of
his ideas, to develop those ideas and to present them in language that
is understandable for
readers unfamiliar with his works. Then, going a step further than the
mere presentation of
Vygotsky’s ideas about education, we shall briefly consider the
application of those ideas in
educational research and in everyday teaching practice.
Theory of mental development and problems of education
If we were to characterize Vygotsky’s theory by employing a series of
keywords or expressions,
the following at least could not fail to be mentioned: human
sociability, social interaction, sign
and instrument, culture, history, and higher mental functions. And if we
were to link these words
and expressions together in a single formula, we could say that the
theory of Vygotsky is a
‘socio-historico-cultural theory of the development of higher mental
functions’ as against the
more frequent description of it as simply a ‘historical-cultural
theory’.
For Vygotsky, the human being is characterized by a ‘primary sociability’. The same idea is expressed more categorically by Henri Wallon: ‘The individual is genetically social’ (Wallon, 1959). During the lifetime of Vygotsky, that principle was no more than a purely theoretical hypothesis. Today, however, it is safe to say that the idea of a primary sociability, to some extent genetically determined, has virtually achieved the status of an established scientific fact. This is due to the convergence of two currents of research: on the one hand biological research on, for instance, the role of sociability in anthropogenesis or on the morpho-functional development of the infant (for example, there is increasing evidence that the areas of the brain governing social functions, such as the perception of a human face or voice, reach maturity earlier and more quickly than others); on the other hand, recent empirical research on social development in earliest childhood offers abundant proof of the existence of a primary and very early sociability (Bowlby, 1971; Schaffer, 1971; Zazzo, 1974, 1986; Thoman, 1979; Lamb and Scherrod, 1981; Tronick, 1982; Lewis and Rosenblum, 1974; Stambak et al., 1983; Zaporozec and Lissina, 1974; Lissina, 1986; Ignjatovic-Savic et al, 1989).
Theoretical analysis led Vygotsky to advance some quite visionary ideas on the early sociability of the child and take them to their logical conclusion in constructing a theory of child development. He wrote in 1932 (Vygotsky, 1982-84, vol. 4, p. 281):
It is through the mediation of others, through the mediation of the adult, that the child undertakes activities. Absolutely everything in the behaviour of the child is merged and rooted in social relations. Thus, the child’s relations with reality are from the start social relations, so that the newborn baby could be said to be in the highest degree a social being.
The sociability of children is the basis for their social interactions
with the people around them.
The problems raised by the psychology of social interaction are now well
known; we shall
therefore confine ourselves here to some brief comments on a few
distinctive traits of
Vygotsky’s theory. Human beings, by reason of their origin and nature,
can neither exist nor
develop in the normal way for their species as isolated monads: part of
them is necessarily
anchored in other human beings — in isolation they are not complete
beings. For the
development of the child, particularly in early infancy, the most
important factor is asymmetrical
interaction, that is, interaction with adults who are vectors of all the
messages of that culture. In
this type of interaction the essential role is played by signs and
various semiotic systems whose
initial purpose, from the genetic standpoint, is to assist communication
and, later, individuation, when they begin to be used as tools for the
organization and control of individual behaviour.3
That is the crux of Vygotsky’s conception of social interaction, which
plays a formative role, a
constructive function, in the child’s development. In other words,
certain types of higher mental
functions, such as deliberate attention, logical memory, verbal and
conceptual thought and
complex emotions, could not emerge and take form in the development
process without the
constructive assistance of social interaction.4
This idea led Vygotsky to generalizations whose heuristic value is far from exhausted, even today. We are thinking here of his famous theory concerning the transformation of interpsychic phenomena into intrapsychic phenomena. Here is one formulation of that idea (Vygotsky, 1982–84, vol. 4, p. 56):
The most important and the most fundamental of the laws that account for genesis and towards which we are led by the study of higher mental functions could be expressed as follows: each instance of semiotic behaviour by the child originated as a form of social collaboration, which is why semiotic behaviour, even in the more advanced stages of development, remains a social mode of functioning. The history of the development of higher mental functions is thus seen to be the history of the process by which the tools of social behaviour are transformed into instruments of individual psychological organization.
The admirable research done by Vygotsky on the basis of that idea
focuses on the relationship
between thought and language during ontogeny. Indeed, this is the
central theme of his work
Thought and Language. We now know that the child’s capacity to acquire
language is strongly
determined by heredity.
Vygotsky’s research reveals that, even so, heredity is not a sufficient
condition and that a
contribution from the social environment in the form of a quite specific
type of teaching process
is also needed. According to Vygotsky, this teaching process is simply
the process of
constructing in common during activities involving the child and the
adult, that is, in social
interaction. During this preverbal collaboration, the adult introduces
language, which, building
on pre-verbal communication, serves in the beginning as a tool for
communication and social
interaction. In his book on the subject Vygotsky describes the
subtleties of the process by means
of which language, as an instrument of social relations, is transformed
into an instrument of
internal psychic organization for the child (apparition of private
language, internal language and
verbal thought).
For our purpose, which is to explore the implications for education of
the theory of
development, there are several important conclusions to be drawn here.
In the first place we are
confronted with an original answer to the question of the relationship
between development and
the teaching process: even for a function determined largely by heredity
(such as language
acquisition), the contribution of the social environment (the teaching
process) is nevertheless
constructive and is therefore more than a mere trigger mechanism, as it
is for instinct, or a mere
stimulant that simply speeds up the development of forms of behaviour
that would have
emerged anyway. The contribution of the teaching process derives from
the fact that it provides
the individual with a powerful tool, namely language. During the
acquisition process this tool
becomes an integral part of the psychic structure of the individual
(with the development of
internal language). But there is something in addition: the new
acquisitions (such as language),
which are of a social origin, start to interact with other mental
functions such as thought. This
encounter engenders new functions such as verbal thought. Here we meet a
Vygotsky hypothesis
that has not yet been sufficiently assimilated and exploited in
research, even in present-day
psychology: the crucial factor in development is not the progress of
each function considered
separately, but the changing relationship between different functions,
such as logical memory,
verbal thought, and so forth. In other words, development consists in
the formation of composite
functions, systems of functions, systemic functions and functional
systems.
Vygotsky’s analysis of the relationship between development and learning
in the case of
language acquisition leads us to define the first model of development:
in a natural process of
development, learning is a means that reinforces this natural process by
making available to it
culture-generated tools that extend the natural possibilities of the
individual and restructure his
mental functions.
The role of adults as representatives of the culture in children’s language acquisition process and in their assimilation of a part of the culture — the mother tongue — leads to the description of a new type of interaction besides social interaction that is of decisive importance to Vygotsky’s theory, namely interaction with the products of culture. Needless to say, it is impossible to separate or to distinguish clearly between these two types of interaction, which often take the form of socio-cultural interaction.
To elucidate these ideas of Vygotsky, we shall draw upon Meyerson (1948), whose central idea is as follows; ‘everything that is human tends to become objectified and to be projected in works’ (p. 69). The task of psychology is ‘to seek out the mental content in the facts of civilization described’ (p. 14), or ‘to discern the nature of the mental operations that are involved’ (p. 138).
In analysing the role of culture in individual development, Vygotsky
advanced similar
ideas. Among all the acquisitions of culture, he focused his attention
on the ones that would
subsequently control mental processes and human behaviour, that is, the
various instruments and
techniques (even technologies) that people assimilate and turn towards
themselves in order to
influence their own mental functions. There thus emerges a gigantic
system of ‘artificial and
external stimuli’ by means of which people gain control over their own
inner state. In Vygotsky,
we encounter once again, but from a different angle, the phenomenon of
interpsychism: from a
psychological point of view, part of the individual is anchored in other
individuals and another
part in his or her works and culture, which, according to Marx, is the
individual’s ‘non-organic
body’. Marx’s expression is highly appropriate: culture forms an
integral part of the individual
but it is, nevertheless, outside him. Hence the development of a person
cannot be reduced solely
to the changes taking place within the individual; it is also an
allomorphic development capable
of taking two different forms—the production of external aids as such
and the creation of
external tools that can be used to produce internal (psychological)
changes. Thus, besides the
instruments that human beings have invented throughout the course of
their history and use to
exercise control over objects (external reality), there exists another
series of tools that, directed
towards themselves, they can use to control, master and develop their
own capacities.
These tools include — to mention just a few — spoken and written language (and, in McLuhan’s phrase, the whole ‘Gutenberg galaxy’), rituals, models of behaviour depicted in works of art, systems of scientific concepts, techniques that assist the memory or thinking, tools that improve motility or human perception, etc. All these cultural tools are ‘extensions of man’ (McLuhan, 1964), that is, extensions and amplifiers of human capacities.
To a cultural anthropologist, such a statement may appear commonplace, but in psychology, where concepts are traditionally coloured by subjectivity, it is very rare for such cultural factors to be taken into account. Even cultural anthropologists, however, often confine themselves to a single aspect, the objectification of human capacities in the products of culture.
For McLuhan, and even more so for Vygotsky at a much earlier date, what is important are the psychological consequences, the impact of the existence of such tools on the development of the individual, namely, the interaction between the individual and these tools. In his analysis of those consequences, Vygotsky starts from the famous aphorism of Francis Bacon, which crops up several times in his works: Nec manus, nisi intellectus, sibi permissus, multum valent: instrumentis et auxilibus res perficitur [The human hand and intelligence, without the necessary tools and aids, are relatively powerless; on the other hand, their strength is reinforced by the tools and aids provided by culture].
In the first place culture creates an ever-growing stock of powerful
external aids (tools,
apparatus, technologies) that back up psychological processes. From
knots in a handkerchief or
notches on a stick for the purpose of remembering certain events, up to
powerful computerized
data banks or modern information technologies, the progress in
‘psychological technology’
never ceases. Alongside the individual and natural memory or
intelligence, there exists an
external and artificial memory and intelligence. How effective would
Europeans of today be if
deprived of these technologies and left to themselves, ‘with naked hand
and intelligence’? Could
psychology produce valid conceptualizations of higher mental processes
without these external
aids? The fact is, the very existence of these aids changes the nature
of the process, which still
takes place within the individual; to be convinced of this, one has only
to observe the changes in
the performance of straightforward arithmetical operations by people who
have become
accustomed to using pocket calculators. The real tasks for research are
the analyses of the
restructuring of inner processes when such aids are present and of the
interaction between the
external and internal aspects of those processes.
In addition to external aids, however, there exist in cultural works psychological tools that are capable of being internalized. These include all semiotic systems, all those skills and intellectual procedures and techniques of the media, intellectual operations and structures, and the models of intellectual activities to be found every time the acquisition of culture occurs. Vygotsky, like McLuhan, did not conclude his analysis at the superficial level of such acquisition. He wanted to grasp its hidden and deeper meanings. The direction of his exploration is expressed in McLuhan’s famous maxim: ‘The medium is the message.’ In other words, it is the medium that carries the profound meanings. This approach can be made more understandable by taking the example of a tool, such as written language (both authors considered this example). An individual — the same also applies to a cultural group, for that matter — who has mastered written language is not just one who also possesses a technical skill.
Written language and book-based culture have a profound impact on the
ways in which
perception, memory and thought function. This is because written
language contains within itself
a model for the analysis of reality (treatment in discrete units,
linearity and temporality in the
organization of thoughts, loss of the sense of totality, etc.) and
psychological techniques
including, in particular, an enhanced power of memory that alters the
relationship between
memory and thought. Hence individuals, in gaining access to the written
language, appropriate
for their own use the psychological techniques available in their
culture, techniques that become
‘internal techniques’ (Vygotsky borrows this term from Claparède). Thus,
a cultural tool takes
root in individuals and becomes personal to them. When we consider
present-day changes in
technology, a question of considerable importance is raised: What are
the consequences of the
employment of modern intellectual (in my view, a more appropriate term
than ‘information’)
technologies, such as computers or computerized data banks, for
individual cognitive processes?
Vygotsky’s admirable research on the appropriation of cultural tools to
serve as internal
techniques deals with the formation of concepts: comparative studies on
experimental concepts,
spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts. The outcome of this
research is presented in his
book, Thought and Language.
At the heart of this research lies the acquisition of systems of
scientific concepts, the
most important acquisition during the period when a child is of school
age. Vygotsky regards the
system of scientific concepts as a cultural tool that is yet another
vehicle for profound messages,
and its assimilation by children induces profound changes in their mode
of thought.
The essential property of scientific concepts is their structure, the fact that they are organized in hierarchical systems (other possible systems would include ‘networks’, ‘groups’, ‘genealogical trees’, etc.). When children interiorize a hierarchical structure they extend considerably the possibilities of their thinking process because such a structure enables them to carry out a series of intellectual operations (different types of definition, logical quantification operations, etc.). The advantages of this structure become obvious when compared with ‘practical’ structures, for example, categories such as ‘furniture’, ‘clothes’ and so forth. If, for example, we attempt to give a logical definition of the term ‘furniture’, we quickly discover the limitations of practical categories or categories based on experience which lack the formal structure of scientific concepts. The advantages all individuals draw from the assimilation of such powerful intellectual tools are obvious.
The assimilation of systems of scientific concepts is made possible by systematic education of the type received at school. Organized systematic education is essential for this, unlike oral language acquisition in which teaching has a constructive role but requires no more than the presence of adults with a command of the language to act as partners in shared activities.
This brings us to the second model of development. Vygotsky calls this ‘artificial development’: ‘education may be defined as the artificial development of the child . . . Education is not limited simply to influencing developmental processes; it restructures in a fundamental manner all behavioural functions’ (Vygotsky, 1982-84, vol. 1, p. 107).
The essential point is that education becomes development: whereas, in
the first model
of development, it was merely the means of reinforcing the natural
process; in the second model,
it is a relatively independent source of development. Using Vygotsky’s
theory, it is possible to
identify several models of development — a point he explained himself on
several occasions — by
focusing on the period of development concerned, on the nature of the
cultural tools, on the
extent to which functions are determined by heredity, etc.
If allowance were made for the enormous range of cultural tools and techniques a person might or might not be given the opportunity to assimilate in particular cultures or periods of history, it would be fairly easy to conceptualize intercultural or historical differences in the cognitive development of groups and of individuals. With such a conception of the development of human intelligence it seems paradoxal to speak of ‘culture-free tests of intelligence’ (which Bruner calls ‘intelligence-free tests’) or to maintain that the only possible scientific definition of intelligence is one that reduces it to indicators such as reaction time, evoked potential, etc., as Eysenck (1988) does.
His analysis of this second model of development, the model of
‘artificial development’,
exemplified in the process by which systems of concepts are assimilated,
leads Vygotsky to his
discovery of the metacognitive dimension of development. The fact is
that the assimilation of
knowledge systems based on such a degree of generalization, the
interdependence of concepts
within a network which smoothes the transition from one concept to
another and simplifies the
execution of intellectual operations, and the existence of external
models (in books or
demonstrated by the teacher) for the conduct of these operations, all
facilitate the individual’s
realization (in Russian, osoznanie) and command (ovladenie) of their own
cognitive processes.
This process of deliberate self-regulation can be helped by the type of
learning process (verbal
learning, explanation of intellectual methods of approach, description
of the concept-building
process, concept-building in common, monitoring of the learning process
by the adult expert,
etc.).
In these conditions, the individual boy or girl would be able to achieve
a fairly clear
understanding of his or her own knowledge-acquisition processes and to
exert deliberate
control — the very essence of metacognitive processes — over them. Here it
should be made clear
that the writings of Vygotsky constitute the most important theoretical
and historical source for
the conceptualization and empirical study of metacognitive processes.
Vygotsky’s scientific
achievement in this field is evident: instead of regarding metacognitive
process as no more than
practical techniques for self-mastery (like mnemonics, for example) or
as an isolated question
(like most questions of metamemory), Vygotsky offers a theoretical
framework. For him, the
problems of metacognitive processes are integrated into a general theory
concerning the
development of higher mental functions. In his theory, these processes
are seen as a stage that is
necessary, in certain specified conditions, for development. In return,
they play an important role
in the restructuring of cognition in general. This role provides the
clearest illustration of
Vygotsky’s conception of development as the process whereby the
relationships between
particular mental functions are transformed. In this context, for
example, even the term
‘metamemory’ (Flavell and Wellman, 1977) is inappropriate, since
Vygotsky is not concerned
here with the working of memorization techniques in the activity of
memorization, but with the
working in such activities of thought processes that have become
conscious and deliberate. In
other words, he is speaking about a new relationship between two
distinct functions.
Even today, Vygotsky’s theory is the only one that offers, at least in principle, the possibility of conceptualizing scientifically metacognitive processes, the only one that makes it possible to link up this dimension of cognitive development with cognitive development in general and to understand the source of a person’s capacity to control his or her own inner processes (as a result of the transition, outlined by Vygotsky and mentioned above, from external inter-individual control to personal intrapsychic control).
We shall conclude this part of our study by sketching in some possible ways in which Vygotsky’s theory of mental development could be utilized in educational research and practice. In our view the most important ones are as follows:
First, no other psychological theory of development attaches so much importance to education. In Vygotsky’s theory, education contains nothing that is external to development. As J. P.Bronckart rightly states (in Schneuwly and Bronckart, 1985, author’s emphasis): ‘The school becomes the natural arena of psychology because it is the scene of learning processes and of the genesis of psychic functions’. That is why the theory could be effectively employed to improve our understanding of education-related phenomena — especially their role in development — to design educational research projects and to test practical applications.
Second, as a direct or indirect consequence of Vygotsky’s theory, a
whole series of new
empirical research problems of capital importance for education have
been incorporated into
present-day psychology.
Research on the sociability of the infant (see sources already mentioned), a rapidly expanding area of research, has improved our understanding of early childhood, and there have already been some practical applications in the education of young children.5
The relationship between social interactions and cognitive development is one of Vygotsky’s typical themes and is very much in fashion in present-day psychology; it stands at the interface between social psychology and cognitive psychology and has obvious practical applications in education (for example, Perret-Clermont, 1979; Doise & Mugny, 1981; CRESAS, 1987; Hinde et al., 1988; Rub≠ov, 1987; Wertsch, 1985a, 1985c).
Current research on semiotic mediation, on the role of semiotic systems in mental development, and on the development of language are manifestly strongly influenced by the ideas of Vygotsky (Ivic, 1978; Wertsch, 1985b; and others).
Third, Vygotsky’s theory is historically and scientifically the only significant source in present-day psychology of research on metacognitive processes. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of these processes in education and development. Even though highly productive theoretical and empirical research could be conceived within the framework of Vygotsky’s theory, the absence of such research is the sole explanation for the continued neglect of these processes in education. They are now both on the agenda of psychology and pedagogy.
Fourth, it would be easy to develop an analytical grid and set of
instruments for research
and diagnosis on the basis of Vygotsky’s concept of ‘artificial
development’, namely, the sociocultural
development of cognitive functions. To start with, it would be enough
simply to build
up a list of the external aids, the tools and the ‘internal techniques’
at the disposal of individuals
and social and cultural groups in order to determine parameters in the
light of which
comparisons could be made. It is obvious that such instruments,
developed within a theoretical
framework of this nature, would eliminate the dangers of racist and
chauvinistic interpretations.
Fifth, besides the two models already mentioned in this article, a whole
series of learning
patterns have been conceptualized on the basis of Vygotsky’s or similar
ideas. These include cooperative
learning, guided learning, learning based on the socio-cognitive
conflict, knowledge
construction in common, etc. (Doise and Mugny, 1981; Perret-Clermont,
1979; Stambak et al.,
1983; CRESAS, 1987; Rub≠ov, 1987; Brown and Palincsar, 1986).
inally, the recent emergence of modern audio-visual media and information technologies, their applications in teaching and their short- and long-term place in the lives of children, raise new and serious problems. What instrument could be more relevant and more useful for research into the impact of these new cultural tools than a theory like Vygotsky’s, which sets their role in psychological, historical and ontogenetic development precisely at the centre of its concerns? This theory offers an ideal conceptual framework for such research, but there remains the hard task of putting it on an operational footing and conducting empirical research.6
When we attempt a critical appraisal of Vygotsky’s ideas, the first observation that springs to mind is that his theory has remained in many respects a mere sketch, insufficiently developed and operational. In many cases, for instance, his theoretical arguments are not illustrated or supplemented by appropriate methodology. These omissions cannot be blamed on Vygotsky, whose ideas were often simply restated rather than built upon by his disciples. Nor can Vygotsky be blamed for the fact that present-day psychology has wasted effort and resources in conducting research based on much less fruitful paradigms than his.
There has been frequent criticism of the distinction drawn by Vygotsky
between two
channels of mental development (which he actually regards as
intertwined), that is to say, natural
(spontaneous and biological) development and artificial (social and
cultural) development. We
are in agreement with Liders7 on the necessity of retaining this
scientifically productive contrast
in preference to the facile claim that all human development is
cultural.
In our opinion the true starting-point for any critical appraisal of Vygotsky’s theory should be the absence of criticism of social and cultural institutions (and ‘tools’). Vygotsky, fascinated by the constructive contributions made by society and culture, never really managed to work out a critical analysis, in the modern sense, of those institutions.
The fact is that the perturbation of social relations (in the social
group, the immediate
environment or the family) may be capable of proving seriously
pathogenetic, precisely through
the action of the mechanisms discovered by Vygotsky. Similarly, the
cultural ‘tools’, again
through the action of Vygotskian mechanisms, cannot be agents solely of
mind formation; they
also contribute to general development — for example, the formation of
narrow-minded,
dogmatic or sterile attitudes — precisely because the individuals
concerned have experienced
interactions with the cultural carriers of such profound tools and
messages.
The critical analysis of institutions, including schools, and of social and cultural agents could clarify the conditions in which socio-cultural ‘tools and instruments’ become the formative factors of development.
Vygotsky’s ideas on teaching
In the first part of this profile we looked into the consequences for
education of Vygotsky’s
theory of development. We shall now briefly review his more explicit
ideas on education. It
must be said, however, that we regard the analysis conducted in the
previous section to be of
greater importance for this subject.
Vygotsky was himself a very active and, it is said, very gifted teacher. As a member of various bodies in charge of national education, he had a hand in dealing with the practical problems facing the Soviet education system at the time, including the transition from a holistic to a discipline-centred approach in primary schools, and throughout his life he was interested in the education of handicapped children.
We shall make a few comments here on the educational problems raised by the relationship between development and the learning process, on the ‘proximal zone of development’ concept and on specific aspects of formal education.
Vygotsky regarded the question of the relationship between development and the learning process as primarily a theoretical one. Since his theory regards education as being closely connected with development, however, and development as taking place in the actual socio-cultural environment, his analyses are focused directly on education of the type provided in schools.
We have already seen that one of his models of development (Model II—artificial development) depends, in fact, upon formal education, the core of which is the acquisition of systems of scientific concepts.
For Vygotsky, therefore, education cannot be reduced to the acquisition
of a body of
information; it is one of the sources of development and is even defined
as the artificial
development of the child. Hence, the essence of education is to ensure
the child’s development
by the provision of tools, internal techniques and intellectual
operations. On many occasions
Vygotsky even speaks of the acquisition (learning) of different types of
activity. If we applied his
approach to botanical classification, for example, we could say that for
Vygotsky the essential
thing is not a knowledge of taxonomic categories but a mastery of the
classification procedure
(definition and application of taxonomic criteria, the classification of
ambiguous or borderline
cases, determination of new members of a class and, most important of
all, learning to execute
the logical operations that interlink various classes, etc.).
All this goes to show that Vygotsky attached the greatest importance to
the content of
educational curricula but placed the emphasis on the structural and
instrumental aspects of that
content, the significance of which was mentioned in our analysis of the
implications of
McLuhan’s phrase ‘the medium is the message’. In this connection, it
must be said that
Vygotsky did not take these fruitful ideas far enough. In this approach
it is quite possible to
regard the school itself as a ‘message’, that is, a fundamental factor
of education because, as an
institution and quite apart from the content of its teaching, it implies
a certain structuring of time
and space and is based on a system of social relations (between pupils
and teachers, between the
pupils themselves, between the school and its surroundings, and so on).
Indeed, the impact of
formal education depends to a considerable extent on these aspects of
the ‘educational medium’.
Secondly, we have already seen that Vygotsky did not take his criticism of formal education very far despite its pertinence to his system of thought: the school does not always teach systems of knowledge but in many cases overburdens its pupils with isolated and meaningless facts; school curricula do not incorporate tools and intellectual techniques; all too often, schools do not provide a setting for social interactions conducive to knowledge construction, etc. Lastly, Elkonin (Elkonin and Davidov, 1966) rightly reproaches Vygotsky for not paying enough attention to teaching methods.
Vygotsky’s concept of ‘the proximal zone of development’ has first of all theoretical implications. In the socio-cultural conception of development children cannot be regarded as cut off from their social and cultural environment like young Robinson Crusoes. Their ties with other people form part of their very nature. It is thus impossible to analyse their development, aptitudes or education without taking social ties into consideration. The concept of the proximal zone of development illustrates this view precisely. This zone is defined as the difference (expressed in units of time) between the performance of the same child working with and assisted by an adult. For example, two children pass tests for 8-year-olds on a psychometric scale; with standardized assistance, the first attains the 9-year level and second the 12-year level; in this case the proximal zone is one year for the first child and four years for the second. In this concept of the proximal zone, the view of the child as a social being engenders a methodological approach with far-reaching implications, since the child’s development is regarded as a dynamic and dialectical process. Applied to pedagogy, the concept of the proximal zone offers a way out of the eternal dilemma of education: should we wait until children have attained a particular level of development before beginning formal education or should we expose them to a certain education so that they may attain a particular level of development?
Following the dialectic of the relationship between the learning and
development processes
examined earlier, Vygotsky adds that development is more productive if
children are exposed to
new learning precisely in their proximal zone of development. In this
zone and with adult
assistance children would be able to assimilate more easily what they
would be incapable of
assimilating if left to themselves.
The actual forms taken by adult assistance in the proximal zone vary
enormously: the
demonstration of methods to be imitated, examples, maieutic questions,
monitoring by the adult
and, most important of all, shared activities (sovmestnaja deatel’nost)
as a constructive factor of
development.
The heuristic value of the proximal zone concept has not been
sufficiently exploited.7 The nature of the concept translates into operational terms the
theoretical conception of the child
as a social being. But its applications need to be taken further and, in
fact, a new approach to the
theoretical and practical construction of diagnostic tools based on that
concept is currently being
developed. It involves studying the dynamics of the development process
(rather than present
performance) and the capacities of normal or handicapped children, in
order to draw maximum
benefit from the assistance and learning opportunities offered.
A second direction that could be explored in the application of this
concept is education
in the family and at school. There is evidence that many parents
spontaneously direct their
teaching efforts precisely towards the proximal zone (Ignjatovic-Savic
et al., 1989). Bearing in
mind Vygotsky’s oft-repeated view that the education of a child should
ideally be aimed at the
proximal zone in which that child experiences his/her encounters with
the culture, assisted by an
adult acting initially as a partner in shared constructions and later as
the organizer of the learning
process, formal education could be regarded as a powerful support for
natural development
(Model I) or as a relatively independent source (Model II). The
references to formal education
that we find in Vygotsky should be taken not as descriptions of actual
educational situations,
however, but rather as an outline for the renewal of education.
Vygotsky’s theory, formulated
over fifty years ago, has such heuristic potential that it could very
well become one of the
instruments for this renewal of present-day formal education.
Notes
1. This profile was first published in Prospects, vol. 19, no. 3, 1989.
2. I have developed these ideas in a monograph dealing with the origin and development of the semiotic function in the child (Ivic, 1978).
3. I have analysed in a recent article one of the possible interpretations of this constructive role of social interactions (CRESAS, 1987).
4. I have attempted to integrate these ideas about early sociability into an educational programme designed for nursery-school children, a programme that is now being employed in the Republic of Serbia (Ivic et al., 1984). In a piece of empirical research (Ignjatovic et al., 1989) my colleagues have brilliantly succeeded in putting this general idea of Vygotsky’s into practice.
5. In a thesis defended at the University of Belgrade, M. Kovac (‘The
Visual Media and Cognitive
Development’) has shown empirically how the specific features of video
may be employed to influence the
cognitive development of children.
6. Liders, in a thesis, has powerfully restated Vygotsky’s fundamental
idea of the two channels of
development (natural and artificial); this text is published in a volume
containing the proceedings of a
conference devoted to Vygotsky. See Nau_noe tvor_estvo Vygotskogo i
sovremennaja psihologia [The
Scientific Achievement of Vygotsky and Contemporary Psychology], Moscow,
APN SSSR.
7. I was unfortunately unable to consult for this article the study by Rogoff and Wertsch (1984) on the proximal zone of development.
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This feature was originally published in Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), XXIV, 3/4. pp. 471-485. 1994.
©UNESCO:International Bureau of Education, 2000. This document may be reproduced free of charge as long as acknowledgement is made of the source.