Lev Vygotsky was born in 1896 in Czarist Russia. He grew up in Gomel a mid-sized city that is in what is now the independent nation of Belorussia about 400 miles west of Moscow. As Jews the Vygotsky family however prosperous were outsiders in Russia under Czar Nicolas. They were strict laws on what jobs Jews could hold. What regions of the country they could live in. And limits on how many could be formally educated. That odds were great but miraculous Vygotsky gained a place. Almost immediately he changed his major from medicine to law. Graduating just as the first world war was ending and the Russian revolution changed all institution and expectations. Vygotsky returned to Gomel and taught. Initially he taught literature in a secondary school and after few years taught teacher education in the local training institution. Thus, he had much practical experience in that field of education. He also became interested in psychology and began to do research in this field. He moved to Moscow and entered the heady intellectual life of the pre-Stalin era of the communist experiment. It was a time of relative openness for academic freedom. During that almost frenzied last decade of his life Vygotsky worked in a wide range of arenas. He worked with displaced refugees with physically and mentally handicapped people in scientific institutes and universities. He also managed to write seven books and dozens of articles before dying at age 37 in 1934.

In 1936 Psychology became politicized and only certain psychologists were approved by Stalin regime and it was not until the 1960’s that the thaw in political influences on academic life occurred after the death of Stalin. Vygotsky’s ideas resurfaced in Russia and his comments on Piaget were published in the west. It was then that professors became able to explore and elaborate the ideas of Vygotsky and with glasnost of late 1980’s Vygotsky’s ideas became increasingly popular in the United States.

The essence of Vygotsky’s theory of learning and development can be grouped into four major ideas:

• Children construct knowledge.
• Learning can lead development.
• Development cannot be separated from its social context.
• Language plays a central role in mental development.

Vygotsky believed that children construct knowledge and do not passively reproduce what is presented to them. Learning is much more than the mirroring; it always involves the learners creating their own representations of new information. In this belief, Vygotsky is like his contemporary, Jean Piaget. Vygotsky studied Piaget’s early work avidly but Piaget did not read Vygotsky’s until very late in his career. For Piaget, construction of knowledge occurs primarily in the child’s interaction with physical objects. For Vygotsky, knowledge is not so much constructed as co-constructed; learning always involves more than one human.

Vygotsky envisioned a more complex relationship between development and learning than either the young Piaget or the elderly Pavlov had conceived. Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that there were maturational prerequisites for certain learning. For example, you cannot master logic without having mastered language.

Vygotsky argued that learning impacts development. With early math for instance, learning skills can hasten development. Rather than viewing this early counting as just wrote reciting, Vygotsky would argue that it nudges the child towards a concept of the symbolic nature of number. Vygotsky gave great value to assisting children to use strategies to further their intellectual capacities.

It is in this context that we will discuss the best-known part of Vygotsky’s work, the Zone of Proximal Development. Take for example the relationship between counting and the concept of number. When asked to count bears, a four-year boy can count meaningfully to twelve and by rote memory to fifteen. But when the teacher structures the activity differently, the same child can perform at a higher level. Counting meaningfully to seventeen without missing any bears. Assistance may take the form of teacher hints or clues, or otherwise setting up a situation so a higher level of outcome can occur. This higher level which the child is currently capable attaining only with help is called the level of assisted performance.

ASSISTED PERFORMANCE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT INDEPENDENT PERFORMANCE

The area between the level of independent performance and the level of assisted performance is the Zone of Proximal Development. It is here where the teacher must focus attention. Not only assistance used by the child needs to be intentionally provided by an adult, Vygotsky believed that a child can perform on a higher level through any type of the social interaction, interaction with peers as equals, with imaginary partners, or with children at other developmental levels. The zone is not static. It shifts as a child progressively attains the higher level. With each shift, the child is capable of learning more complex concepts and skills. Obviously, there are concepts and skills beyond a child’s current zone of proximal development. For instance, a four-year old cannot be taught calculus even by the most gifted teacher.

The concept of the zone of proximal development has at least three important implications for early childhood education.

1. First, it causes us as educators to rethink how we intervene, what mediation or action on our part will help this particular child make the next step in his understanding. Do we give oral hints? Or do we pair him with the child who is slightly more advanced? Or do we have him teach a child who is just starting?
2. Second, the zone of proximal development has important implication for how we assess children.
3. The unassisted performance level is what we have traditionally examined in both standardized testing situations and even in the individual portfolios. What can a child perform alone?

We turn now to the most pervasive of the Vygotskian tenants that development cannot be separated from its social context. For Vygotsky, the social context influences more than just attitudes and beliefs. It has a profound influence on how we think, as well as what we think. Vygotsky and his colleagues witnessed the rapid social changes in the Soviet Union that occurred when non-technical cultures, like Uzbeks of Central Asia, suddenly were expected to participate in the quite technically advanced western culture of the new empire.

Not only was their knowledge based different but even their way of thinking about experience was different. Vygotsky and his colleagues developed studies to examine how the social context affected the thinking, perception, and memory of the Uzbeks. Like anthropologists, who have studied other preliterate cultures, Vygotsky discovered that Western logic is not universal. Other cultures have ways of classifying and describing experience that differ from ours but they are appropriate to their environments. These are scenes from Manus New Guinea in the early 1950’s photographed by Lenora Forestell under the guidance of Margaret Mead.

MENTAL FUNCTIONS

Vygotsky did believe that there is a similar structure of the mind in all humans. He believed that there are two levels of mental functioning, lower and higher. The lower mental functions consist of such abilities as reactive attention, reacting to a loud noise or bright-colored objects.

Associate memory as when we learn to stop at red lights and sensory-motor thought. These functions are innate, part of our biological heritage and shared with the higher animals. The higher mental processes are unique to humans passed down through generations by teaching and learning. Their form varies from culture to culture. Through the passing of cultural tools, such functions as focused attention, the ability to concentrate in spite of distractions, deliberate memory, the ability to remember on purpose. Responding to different environmental forces, different cultures have evolved different tools. Non-literate societies use very different means of storing information than literate ones. Internal mental tools are largely language-based; for instance, mnemonic devices or categories. Young children are in the process of developing internal mental tools and require adult assistance for this process. According to Vygotsky, the whole history of human culture is based on the development of mental tools primitive external ones to complex ones. We cannot elaborate in this program all the implications Vygotsky’s theory has for cross-cultural studies. But they are many. Appreciation of the ingenuity humans have demonstrated in dealing with and trans

Language plays a central role in mental development.

Language is both the transmitter of these cultural tools and the most important of them. This brings us to our last proposition. Language place a central role in mental development.

According to Vygotsky, language is a mechanism for thinking the most important mental tool. Language is the means by which information is passed from one generation to another. We can see young children learning about rhymes in situations like this. We can think about and discuss things that have happened, will happen, and even things that might never happen with language. It is through language that all cultures have passed on the higher mental functions that enable us to make sense of our world. Language is the means by which information is passed from one generation to another. According to Vygotsky, language is a mechanism for thinking the most important mental tool. We can see young children learning about rhymes in situations like this. We can think about and discuss things that have happened, will happen, and even things that might never happen with language.

Learning always involves external experience being transformed into internal processes through the mediation of language. Language is the medium that carries the experience into the mind. Teaching a new skill, we tell the child what it is we want him to do. Children appropriate the rule and use it independently to regulate their own behavior. Thus, all learning goes through this cycle of exterior and interior prompts eventually becoming a part of the children’s own repertoires.