Elka’s Summary of Vygosty – My Life in TESOL

Following is Elka’s handout about Lev Vygotsgy.

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896 –1934)

Here is the information used in the various segments of our class on Vygotsky. It was my objective for this class to re-constructe, with you help, the social, intellectual, and cultural climate in Vygotsky’s Soviet Russia that influenced his views on education. I also wanted to model knowledge co-construction “in action” by tapping into your background knowledge in a number of areas while using ample visuals as scaffolding.

Enclosed are also summaries of some of Vygotsky’s ideas which we briefly explored in class today. These are some of the ideas which have had the strongest impact on people’s teaching practices in many different countries.

Vygotsky’s Contemporaries:

Psychologists: A.R.Luria, A.N. Leontiev
Linguists: R. Jakobson, M. Bakhtin
Writers: B.Pasternak, S.Yessenin, I.Ehrenburg, M.Gorky, V. Mayakovsky, M.Tsvetaeva, A.Ahmatova, A.Blok, L.Tolstoy
Artists: M.Chagall, V.Kandinsky, K.Malevich, N.Gabo, I. Repin
Directors: K.Stanislavsky, S.Eisenstein
Composers: S.Rachmaninov, S.Prokofiev, I.Stravinsky

Here is also the information we explored in class on Vygotsky’s personal and professional life following our constructivist format:

Family Background

Vygotsky was born into a middle class Jewish family in a small village in Byelorussia. He was the second eldest of eight children, although he and his elder brother were the only children in the family to live to adulthood. His parents were wealthy and well-educated. His father worked in a bank and his mother was a teacher.

In 1924 Vygotsky married Rosa Smerkhova, moved to Moscow, and had two daughters.

Vygotsky contracted tuberculosis in 1919 and died in 1934 at the age of thirty-seven. He was buried in Moscow at Novodevichie cemetery, a burial place of honor for Russians.

Educational Background

Vygotsky received a traditional Jewish education and was particularly interested in poetry and literature. At the time there was a set quota for Jews allowed to study for a university degree but Vygotsky was one of the lucky ones to win admission through an existing lottery system.

First, he studied law, medicine, literature, and philosophy at Moscow University. He went into psychology much later. He completed his Ph.D. in psychology at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1924, submitting as his thesis his first publication “Psychology of Art”.

Vygotsky read and spoke Russian, German, French, English, Esperanto, and Hebrew. He also read Latin and Greek and could speed read “diagonally”. He studied independently with a mathematician, Solomon Ashpiz, using a technique based on the Socratic Method. He presided over a Jewish history study circle where he met Hegel. Vygotsky was awarded a gold medal at college for his outstanding academic abilities.

Vygotsky’s Closest Associates

Vygotsky inspired many Russian psychologists and worked closely with many of his students. His two most prominent associates are A.R.Luria and A.N.Leontiev. Luria and Leontiev were both instrumental for keeping Vygotsky’s work alive and making it accessible to the West.

A.R. Luria (1902-1977)

Alexander Luria was born in Kazan, an old Russian university town east of Moscow. While still a student, he established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Association. His earliest research was focused on assessing Freudian ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effect of fatigue on mental processes.

Luria met Vygotsky in 1924. Together Leontiev, Vygotsky, and Luria were looking for an approach to psychology that would enable them to ‘discover the way natural processes such as physical maturation and sensory mechanisms become intertwined with culturally determined processes to produce the psychological functions of adults’ (Luria 1979:43).

A.N. Leontiev (1904-1979)

His entire life Alexei Leontiev was a prominent figure at Moscow State Lomonosov University (MGU). He conducted extensive research on deliberate memory and attention, and developed his own theory of activity, which linked social context to development.

In contrast with the stimulus-response models of behaviorism psychologists, in Activity Theory people do not simply passively absorb and react to stimuli from the ‘outer world’. They actively explore and transform their material and social environments. In this active process, we all produce and reproduce our culture and consciousness.

Key Concepts & Ideas Part 1

Children Construct Knowledge

Vygotsky believed that children construct knowledge and do not passively reproduce what is presented to them. Learning to him was much more than mirroring. It always involves learners creating their own representations of new information.

Learning Can Lead Development

Unlike Piaget who contended that cognitive development leads learning, Vygotsky insisted that learning leads development. In his view, being presented with challenges and assisted in overcoming these challenges induces the development of new abilities.

“The only ‘good learning’ is that which is in advance of development” (1978:89)

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The ZPD is the difference between a child’s capacity to solve problems on its own and its capacity to solve them with assistance. The actual development, in other words, refers to all the mental functions and activities a child can perform on its own, without the help of anyone else. The ZPD, on the other hand, includes all the functions and activities a child or a learner can perform when assisted by a more skilled or knowledgeable other. The person in this scaffolding process can be an adult (parent, teacher, caretaker) or a peer who has already mastered that particular function.

Key Concepts & Ideas Part 2

Social Constructivism

Cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are not primarily determined by innate factors, but are the product of the activities practiced in the social institutions of the culture in which the individual grows up. Consequently, the history of the society in which a child is reared and the child’s personal history are crucial determinants of its consciousness.

Higher Mental Functions

‘Higher mental functions’ (logical memory, voluntary attention, concept formation, and will) originate in social life and undergo transitions before attaining their final structure within the individual.

Encouraging children/learners to draw on their experiences, to talk to each other about them, to write about them, and even to talk to themselves about them, enables them to move toward being independent self-regulating individuals.

Zone of Proximal Development (continued)

The ZPD is a level of development attained when learners are engaged in social behavior. Full development of the ZPD depends upon full social interaction. The range of skills and knowledge that can be developed with teacher guidance or peer collaboration exceeds what can be attained alone, without any assistance.

The concept of ZPD has a number of important implications for education. To mention but a few: 1/ it invites educators to rethink how they intervene, what mediation or action on their part will help a particular learner to make the next step in his or her understanding, 2/ the ZPD has an important implication for how we assess learners. It is the unassisted performance level that we have traditionally examined in standardized testing. Assessment should be dynamic, i.e. it needs to focus on the process of change, 3/ instruction should be based on learners’ potential level of development.

Thought and Language, Part One

Both thought and language pass through a series of “plateaus” with speech having a pre-intellectual stage and thought a pre-verbal stage. The earliest speech of the child is essentially social. At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric and communicative speech. … Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behavior to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions. In time egocentric speech leads to inner speech, which serves both autistic and logical thinking.

Thought and Language Part Two

Today’s class was dedicated to all the Eastern European intellectuals who have influenced my thinking as an educator. I would like to extend special thanks to my SMAT students Rada Balan, Dana Kitic and Radmila Popovic, for the shared excitement we had about a format that captures both the richness of the era Vygotsky lived in and the essence of “knowledge co-construction” and “constructivism” as powerful pedagogical tools.

The following websites and books, among many others, were a particularly rich source of information for me in putting this all together:

Vygotsky and Education: Instructional implications and applications of socio-historical psychology, L. Moll (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1990.