V-+Vygotsky's+Constructivism

 **Lev Vygotsky’s Constructivism and the Role of Challenge in Learning** Kasey Asberry

Lev Vygotsky understood that learners construct knowledge as they work to make sense of their social context and experience. He proposed that this sense-making happened as a result of social mediation in the gap between a learner’s ability and budding ability, the Zone of Proximal Development. This interactional approach to teaching and learning leverages several key concepts:

• Learning precedes and stimulates development • Development is the process of conversion of concrete, external social relations into symbolic, internal mental functions • Meaningful learning occurs when the individual is challenged within the Zone of Proximal Development and provided appropriate mediation • Collaborative problem-solving is the primary context for instruction • Mediation includes play, guided learning, work and especially, language

For Vygotsky learning drives “the transition from direct, innate, natural forms and methods of behavior to mediated, artificial mental functions that develop in the process of cultural development” (Vygotsky, “Collected Works” p168)


 * Conditions for Learning**

Vygotsky believed that individual psychological development retraces human evolution, or ontogeny repeats phylogeny, but in contrast to the prevailing thought in his time he saw an individual’s learning trajectory as beginning with social interactions:

"Development does not proceed toward socialization"; he said it is "the conversion of social relations into mental functions...accomplished via a tool or a sign" (Driscoll, p244).

Therefore language formation is the most fundamental case. Challenges or problem solving provide context to both assess and address the gap between ability and capacity. The upper limits of interactivity, at the frontier of symbolic processing, can be addressed via informal instruction, work and paradoxically, play. Vygotsky emphasized the connection he found between play and language formation with learning. Play allows children to “project themselves into adult activities and culture, rehearse future roles and values using whatever resources are at hand”. This complexity is transferred to a gestural system that provides a foundation for language development and spurs further development as abstraction frees the person from immediate environmental constraints to decontextualize and generalize experience for wider application. Good instruction then tailors challenges to operate in this gap between ability and potential.

A further requirement for useful instruction entails a “bidirectional” exchange between individual & context, significantly through social partners of unequal ability who work together to solve problems. This exchange or “reciprocal teaching”, requires an additional condition of intersubjectivity, a mutual understanding of common goals and shared power. For Vygotsky these relationships provide the context for meaningful learning capable of driving development to the engagement of increasingly abstract mediations. The concept of collaborative problem solving appropriate to an individual’s Zone of Proximal Development forms the core of Vygotsky’s method.



Rooted in experimental psychology and analysis conducted during the few years between his graduation from law school at Moscow University in 1917 (Blunden, 2001) and his death in 1934 Vygotsky articulated a distinctive approach to developmental psychology and learning. He rejected Piaget’s tenet that “development is a precondition for learning’, recognizing both that while learning is in advance of development, development follows its own internal dynamic – the relationship is not a linear one. Neither did he find resonance in the Behaviorist-Cognitivist posit that “development is learning”. He saw learning as more cathartic than “merely acquisition of many special abilities for thinking about things” but focused instead upon learning as the widening transference of ability through increasingly abstract mental activity. His critics have been troubled by a difficulty in understanding the implications in his theory for instruction, his model of memory and his political milieu. Some have found his emphasis upon work, where he recommended “ socially organized labor activity provides context for learning as well as action & thought” was too utilitarian. This may be code for ‘influenced by Marxist ideology’ reflecting more of a bias against authoritarian government which may be unsupported in his work. More likely this emphasis is related to Vygotsky’s firm belief that problems ought to provide an authentic link to social context. In fairness, his socialist contemporaries had trouble understanding his work as well; he was sanctioned both at home and abroad. His work was not translated and published outside of Russia until 1962 (“Thought & Language”, MITPress).

Although Vygotsky’s career was cut short by tuberculosis in his early 40’s his colleagues went on to test and implement many of the strategies he proposed. Vygotsky’s model continues to influence early childhood, K-12, adult and ongoing education frameworks as experiential learning, cognitive apprenticeships, discovery learning and overall in the foundations of Constructivism in teaching and learning. (Clark, 2008; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998; Driscoll, 2000)


 * Conclusions**

Since I knew so little about Learning Theorists when we selected midterm projects I have to admit that I chose to research Vygotsky solely based upon his photograph. What a kind, thoughtful expression!

This was a fortuitous choice since it turns out that I gravitate toward his work. Lev Vygotsky was a disruptive thinker who proposed and explored some useful ideas. After reading about Vygotsky’s approach I see some of my teaching experiences in a different light and I want to spend more time with his ideas, particularly with regard to language and memory.

During the summer of 1996 I was invited to work with researchers at Xerox PARC who were interested in understanding what the future of work might look like. I joined a team that was tasked to work with a group of teenagers to discover what their ideas for work life in the future looked like, Future Workscapes. For several months we taught them about the history of work, exposed them to the creative resources at their disposal, took them on fieldtrips to factories and other workplaces. Discovery was their job. Teaching and documentation was ours. We didn’t dictate what their creative activity should be but they all had computers just like we did. One kind of job they were introduced to was computer game creator. We quickly found out that the workshop we had constructed for them devolved into an expensive electronic game-playing suite. For several weeks nothing happened but endless electronic competition. It began to look like the research project would be derailed. One morning I woke up with a desperate idea for a board game that explored their ideas about work. I made a crude tabletop game and this is how it worked. (Yes, for 2 hours they were willing to play it and break the hypnotic hold of the electronic game.) The set up: a spiral grid drawn on a 3’x3’ sheet of butcher paper, 25 cards with occupations, 50 cards of circumstances. Order of play: each player draws an occupation card and places it on the grid and tells the story of the “librarian”, “state representative”, “plumber”. On the next turn a circumstance card is drawn and the player verbally justifies where their occupation card must be moved in the grid (change with respect to the hierarchy of other occupations). Their justification is either accepted or challenged by the group. Winning happens when their occupation cards can be moved to the pinnacle of success and justified.
 * Example: Development of △Work, the game**

At the time I didn’t know that this was Constructivism but I was very motivated to get ideas moving and respect the dynamic we had built in our workplace. So I built a context that would generate discussion, keep us on the topic of research and challenge our worker-students while allowing them to do what they loved to do – argue and play games.


 * Works Cited**

Asberry, Kasey "Delta Work, the game", available from: http://humanorigins.org/archives/project/jobimweb/frame/deltawk.html

Blunden, Andy “The Vygotsky School”, 2001 available from: [|http://home.mira.net/~andy/seminars/chat.htm]

Clarke, Ruth Colvin, “Developing Technical Training”, John Wiley & Son, 2008

Driscoll, Marcy, “Psychology of Learning for Instruction”, Allyn & Bacon, 2000

Kuhn, Thomas “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, University of Chicago Press, 1962

Vygotsky, Lev “Collected Works”, Plenum Press, NY, 1987

Wiggins, Grant, McTighe, Jay, “Understanding by Design”, Merrill Prentice Hall, 1998