Lev Vygotsky

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Lev Vygotsky

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Лев Семенович Выготский) (November 17 (November 5 Old Style), 1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet developmental psychologist whose work received widespread recognition in the Western world in the 1960s as English translations appeared. According to Vygotsky, the intellectual development of children is a function of human communities, rather than of individuals. His contributions are widely respected and influential within the fields of developmental psychology, education, and child development.

Biography

Lev was born was born in Orsha, Belarus (then Russian empire), into a well-to-doJewish family, on November 5th, 1896. Soon, his father was appointed department chief of the United Bank of Gomel and the family moved. Vygotsky spent his childhood in Gomel. Vygotsky's mother had trained to be a teacher but saw her priority in being at home to provide a stimulating and enriching environment for her eight children. Vygotsky completed his primary education at home with his mother and a private tutor and then entered public school for his secondary education. When a child, Vygotsky read Torah. Possessing an exceptional reading speed and memory he was an excellent student in all subjects at school. Vygotsky graduated from secondary school with a gold medal at the age of 17. He entered the University of Moscow and initially studied Medicine, then switched to Law. Vygotsky continued his self-directed studies in philosophy. After graduating from the University of Moscow Vygotsky returned to Gomel to teach Literature and Philosophy. In Gomel, he married Rosa Smekhova, in 1924, and they had two daughters. Vygotsky set up a research laboratory at Gomel The Teacher's College of Gomel. In 1924, he made a presentation at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad. He discussed and compared methods of reflexological and psychological investigation. Vygotsky's presentation was very well received, and he was offered a position at the Psychological Institute of Moscow. In the same year, he moved to Moscow, to work on a diverse set of projects. In that period he lived in the basement of the Institute and while living there he had the opportunity to read masses of archived materials which he later put to good use.

He died of tuberculosis in 1934, leaving a wealth of work that is still being explored.

Work

Vygotsky's investigations include three essential areas:

• Development of a human being, i.e., Human Development. Vygotsky uses the genetic/dialectical/developmental method in explaining human growth. He develops theories on The zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
• Historical cultural theory, i.e., the dialectics of the development of the humankind. Vygorsky claims that higher mental functioning in the individual emerges out of social processes. He also claims that human social and psychological processes are fundamentally shaped by cultural tools, or mediational means. He uses the terms mediation and internalization.
• Development of human thought and language in ontogenesis and philogenesis. He uses the term psychological tools. Vygotsky covers such diverse topics as the origin and the development of higher mental functions, philosophy of science and methodology of psychological research, the relation between learning and human development, concept formation, language and thought, psychology of art, play as a psychological phenomenon, the study of learning disabilities and abnormal human development. In all these theories, Vygotsky uses the dialectical approach as a method of investigation. He also denotes the dialectics of theses developments.

Human Development

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which relates to the gap or difference between child's existing abilities and what she/he can learn with the guidance of an adult or a more capable peer. While commonly quoted by educators, the ZPD is still not widely used the way in which Vygotsky initially presented the idea, specifically how it relates to assessment. The Zone of proximal development uses two levels to gauge a child's ability and potential. A child's actual development level is when he or she can work unaided on a task or problem. This sets a baseline for the child's knowledge and is traditionally what is assessed and valued in schools. The Potential development level is the level of competence a child can reach when he or she is guided and supported by another person. The difference between these two levels of ability consist of the ZPD. This idea of a significant adult guiding a child through the ZPD is known as scaffolding. This concept has been further developed by Jerome Bruner and influenced his related concept of instructional scaffolding.

Psychology of play

Lesser known, but a direct correlate to the ZPD and of utmost importance to Vygotsky, was his concept of play. Play was a moment where social rules were put into practice - a horse would behave as horse even though it was a stick. These types of rules always guided a child's play. Vygotsky even once described two sisters at dinner "playing" at being sisters at dinner. Vygotsky believed that play contained all developmental levels in a condensed form. Therefore, to Vygotsky, play was akin to imagination where a child extends her/himself to the next level of her/his normal behavior, thereby creating a zone of proximal development for her/himself. In essence, Vygotsky believed "play is the source of development." Psychology of play was later developed by Vygotsky's student Daniil El'konin.

Historical-cultural Development

Cultural mediation and internalization

In addition to these ideas, Vygotsky also forwarded the notion that culture and community play a huge role in early development. Vygotsky is well-known for his model being termed sociocultural approach. For him, a child's development is a direct result of her/his culture. For Vygotsky, development applied primarily to mental development, such as thought, language, reasoning processes and mental functions. However, Vygotsky observed that these abilities developed 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, namely speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge that effected a child's construction of her/his knowledge. The specific knowledge gained by a child through these interactions also represented the shared knowledge of a culture. This process is known as internalization.

Development of Thought and language individually and historically

Another important Vygotsky contribution concerns the inter-relationship of language development and thought. This concept, explored in Vygotsky's book Thought and Language, establishes the explicit and profound connection between speech, (both silent inner speech and oral language) and the development of mental concepts and cognitive awareness metacognition.

It is through inner speech and oral languge Vygotsky argued, that thoughts and mental constructs (a child's intellectual being) are formed. A child's conscious awareness of these and their being impressed upon the human psyche provide an underlying theoretical rationale for such truisms as: "If you want to learn something, teach it to someone", "the one who does the talking, does the learning", "I talked myself into it"; and the observations of our need to "talk it out" and "think out loud."

Influence and development of Vygotsky's ideas

According to some US scholars (Cole, Toulmin), Vygotsky formulated a meta-psychology that encompassed the phylogeny, cultural history, ontogeny and moment to moment dynamics of human psychological functioning as a life long process of becoming. In the Soviet Union, the ideas of Vygotsky were developed largely under the banner of activity theory that was introduced and systematically developed by such Vygotsky's students and colleagues as Alexei Leont'ev, P. Zinchenko, Zaporozhets, D. El'konin, as well as Gal'perin, Davydov, Smirnov, Talyzina.

In the West, most attention was aimed at the continuing work of Vygotsky's Western contemporary Jean Piaget. Early - albeit indirectly - influence on growing the cognitive science community in the United States was already apparent in the late 1950s and early 1960s through the work of Vygotsky's student and collaborator Alexander Luria which was read by early pioneers of cognitive science J. S. Bruner and George Miller. However, 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.

By the 1980s, Vygotsky's work became well known in the United States in part due to the opening of the Soviet Union due to glasnost. Vygotsky's work became extremely influential because it offered a way of reconciling the competing notions of maturation by which a child is seen as an unfolding flower best left to develop on his or her own, and environmentalism, in which a child is seen as a blank slate onto which must be poured knowledge. His views are influential on activity theory, distributed cognition, and Cognitive Apprenticeships.

Works of Vygotsky are also studied today by linguists regarding language and its influence on the formation of the perception of reality. His work has also been influential on second language acquisition theory.

Vygotsky's Writings Chronologically

• 1924 Presentation of the paper "Methodology of reflexological and psychological research at the Second Psychoneurological Congress in Leningrad
• 1925 Doctoral thesis 'Psychology of Art' Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior
• 1926 published Pedagogical Psychology/Educational Psychology
• 1927 Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation
• 1929 The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child
• 1930 Primitive Man and his Behaviour, The socialist alteration of man
• 1931 Adolescent Pedagogy
• 1933 Play and its role in the Mental Development of the Child
• 1934 Thinking and Speaking

Vygotsky's Works • The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky • Lev Vygotsky Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation 1927 • Lev Vygotsky Thinking and Speaking 1934 • The Psychology of Art 1925 • "Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior" 1925 • Educational Psychology 1926 • The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child 1929 • The socialist alteration of man 1930 • Primitive Man and his Behavior c1930 • Adolescent Pedagogy 1931 • Play and its role in the Mental Development of the Child 1933 • Written, Inner and Oral Speech • Vygotsky on play • Lev Vygotsky on Literature and Art • The Socialist alteration of Man, 1930

Vygotsky's Basic Writings

• Robert Rieber in 6 volumes
• Thought and Language
• Mind and Society
• The Psychology of Art

Vygotsky's texts online

• Lev Vygotsky archive @ marxists.org.uk: all major works (in English)
• Lev Vygotsky's Psychology of Art (in Russian)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Cheyne A.& Tarulli, D.,1996 Dialogue, Difference, and the "Third Voice" in the Zone of Proximal Development http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/ZPD.html
• Cole, M & Wersch, J. 1994 Beyond The Individual-Social Antimony In Discussions Of Piaget And Vygotsky http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/virtual/colevyg.htm
• Uwe P. Gielen and Samvel Jeshmaridian (1999). Lev S. Vygotsky: The man and the era. International Journal of Group Tensions. Volume 28, Numbers ¾, p. 273-301.
• Robert Rieber's book about Vygotsky
• Schütz, R., 2004 VYGOTSKY & LANGUAGE ACQUISITION http://www.english.sk.com.br/sk-vygot.html/ http://www.sk.com.br/sk-vygot.html
• Smagorinsky P. The Social Construction of Data: Methodological problems of investigating learning. In: The Zone of Proximal Development http://Psych.Hanover.Edu/Vygotsky/Smagor.html
• Van der Veer, J., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

External links

• Short bio
• Vygotsky Centennial Project
• The Mozart of Psychology
• Vygotsky's Contribution to Mentally Healthy Deaf Adults

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