Learning According to Vygotsky

The Proximal Development

Lev Semionovitch Vygotsky (1896–1934), a scholar of Historical-Cultural Psychology, developed his work under the influence of Marx’s and Engels’ theories. The main focus of his study would be the relationship between thought and language. He gave importance to the role of formal education, developed his theory in a different point of view than existed in his time.

Vygotsky develops his theory in the revolutionary context of his time. There are references that postulated that psychological processes should be understood in their entirety and from the perspective of a movement, in a dialectical view of the integral process of behavior. This behavior would be directly related to the social characteristic of the being.

We present below conceptual elements of Vygotsky’s theory.

📖SCHOOL EDUCATION IN THE PROCESS OF MAN’S HUMANIZATION — Vygotsky highlights the role of the school as a mediating institution for the humanization (civilization) of man. This becomes more evident when he says that the knowledge accumulated by humanity is not transmitted genetically. Hence the importance he attaches to child development as an opportunity for a more appropriate appropriation of knowledge, full of results. Vygotsky observes that there is a dependence between the use of the childhood phase and factors such as:

• teacher training and
• suitable conditions for development.

📖THE HIGHER PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS: MAN’S INDEPENDENCE— There are factors that affect the human development process such as the ancestry of the phylogeny, the sequence of stages we go through during life as part of our ontogeny with influence of the social history of the individual. In this context, Vygotsky highlights the differentiation between man and other species, given that man is the active subject of his own evolution. He says that this evolutionary aspect paves the way for the acquisition of superior psychic functions related to the conscious content of man, such as:

• language acquisition,
• development of emotions,
• the formation of new types of social behavior (consciously controlled actions, voluntary processes), internalizing cultural forms of behavior.

In this process of development, the phylogenetic process of man reaches a new stage by transforming elementary psychic processes (reflexive actions, automatic reactions) into superior processes, that is, those of cultural origin (sociogenesis), thus enabling the independence and planning of his actions in the world, and therefore its uniqueness, through the process of microgenesis

📖CHILD DEVELOPMENT: FROM REFLECTIVE TO INTENTIONAL ACTIONS —One of the examples that can be cited as a reference to Vygotsky’s thinking is about the development of the child’s attention process. In her postulation, she emphasizes symbolic language as a mediating instrument in the process of internalizing culture. It approaches in the sense that this process at a productive level must be mediated in an organized way according to the level of cultural internment.

📖CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND ITS REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES — This concept emphasizes that the process of development of the child’s superior psychic functions takes place in a revolutionary process and not of the evolutionary type as it may be assumed at first, working from the outside to the inside and according to contact with the environment.
At the same time it is also suggested that the peculiarity of the influence of the richness of the environment in all aspects allows for greater possibilities of development. Likewise, if a child is cut off from cultural modes of natural intellectual development, he will not fully realize the process of cultural development.

📖 RELATIONS BETWEEN LEARNING AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT— This item is sui-generis, as it is summarized here, in one paragraph, a wealth of details of Vygotsky’s theory: He says that he identifies the strong role of the school in collaborating with the child in the appropriation of cultural techniques, allowing him to overcome methods more primitive and develop towards higher psychological functions. He says that, in this way, the school creates a reserve of experience, implements a large number of complex and sophisticated auxiliary methods and opens up countless new potentials for natural human function.

📖DEVELOPMENT: FROM PROXIMAL TO REAL— Vygotsky says that the child, in terms of development, when he experiences limitations from his mediator, also does so for his development, limiting the understanding of his learning and development to only what he is capable of doing autonomously, that is, what he is able to to do at the present moment or to what is “mature” to execute. It is in this focus that the mediator must be acting synchronized by what the zone of proximal development (ZPD) allows.

📖LEARNING PROCESS: EVERYDAY AND SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS — In particular, Vygotsky focuses on the school’s mission as an agent in scientific learning, which is systematically fixed in the student’s mind through higher cognitive functions supported by the acquired framework of spontaneous knowledge. According to Vygotsky, in this context, the responsibility of educators is great and that the child’s development coexists with the educational process, as it is an agent of transformation of the functions of behavior.

📖EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE —There is a focus on Educational Psychology which he suggests is involved in an issue open to studies and developments, being an opportunity to intervene in the general or specific scenario (defined by culture), so that there is a productive process of reach school education, for example.