Lev Vygotsky



Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (Лев Семенович Выготский) (November 12 (November 5 Old Style), 1896 – June 11, 1934) was a Belarusian developmental psychologist, discovered by the Western world in the 1960s. 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
He was born in Orsha, Belarus (then Russian empire) and grew up in Homel (southern Belarus) in a prosperous Jewish family. Vygotsky attended Moscow University, majoring in law. He graduated in 1918 and returned to Gomel where he worked as a school teacher and studied psychology. In 1924 he moved to Moscow, working on a diverse set of projects. He died of tuberculosis in 1934, leaving a wealth of work that is still being explored.

Work
Vygotsky's work includes several key concepts, the most widely-known of which is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which relates to the gap or difference between what the child can learn unaided and what he or she can learn with the help of an adult or a more capable peer. The ZPD is still not widely used in the way in which Vygotsky initially presented the idea, that is, in terms of assessment. This idea of assisting the learner is known as scaffolding.

When a child works unaided on a task or problem, that individual is said to be at their actual development level. Potential development level is the level of competence a child can reach when he or she is guided and supported by another person.

This concept was later developed by Jerome Bruner and influenced Bruner's related concept of instructional scaffolding. Another important Vygotskyan contribution relates to the development of language as related to thought. This concept is explored in his brilliant book Thought and Language in which Vygotsky establishes the explicit and profound connection between oral language (speech) and the development of concepts (mental constructs) and one's conscious awareness of them--providing the underlying theoretical rationale for such truisms as "If you want to learn something, teach it to someone." And for the observation that by "talking it out" we clarify an issue in our own minds.

Vygotsky's model of human development has been termed as a sociocultural approach. For him, the individual’s development is a result of his or her culture. Development, in Vygotsky’s theory, applies mainly to mental development, such as thought, language, and reasoning processes. These abilities were understood to develop through social interactions with others (especially parents) and therefore represented the shared knowledge of the culture. These abilities are developed through a process called internalization. Internalization describes how children’s social activities develop to become mental activities. When children listen and participate with parents, teachers, and peers, they begin to internalize and process new information.

Lesser known, but of utmost of importance to Vygotsky, is his concept of play. Play as Vygotsky determined, is something akin to extended imagination. All play is defined by rules; there can be no play without rules. Vygotsky gives common examples of play; pretending an object is something it is not, a stick becomes a horse; or fulfilling roles of an idealized situation, Vygotsky discusses sisters at dinner 'playing' at being sisters at dinner. According to Vygotsky, play is the solitary act within which the child extends herself the farthest and is most rigorously in strict adherence to 'rules'. Vygotsky states, "...play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form; in play it is as though the child were trying to jump above the level of his normal behavior.", and "Play is the source of development and creates the zone of proximal development."

Vygotsky's work appeared largely forgotten after his death. Most attention was aimed at the continuing work of Vygotsky contemporary Jean Piaget. However, early - albeit indirectly - influence on growing 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 later collaborator Alexander Luria which was read by early pioneers of cognitive science J. S. Bruner and George Miller.

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 behaviourism, 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.