The Development of Children: Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Russian thinking in the early years of the twentieth century is mostly associated with Bolshevik literature and the communist ideology of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The name of Lev Vygotsky does not evoke a familiar response from people other than students and teachers of psychology. Nevertheless, Vygotsky was one of the most prolific and original thinkers of his time and his work and theorising on social development and child psychology has drawn great appreciation and recognition in the west after his work was first published there in 1962. He was in fact called ‘The Mozart of Psychology’.

Vygotsky’s theories focus on the importance of culture, language and speech in a child’s development and the extent of stimuli s/he receives through the heard words and sentences of the people in his immediate environment. To him speech was as important as vision in the learning process of children and in the development of their minds. Vygotsky goes on to state that a child’s development is influenced greatly by the society and culture in which he grows up and his approach is thus called the socio-cultural approach. His theory applies primarily to mental development, incorporating thought, language and reasoning and is thought to develop through social interaction with others, primarily parents or parent substitutes. It thus represents the shared knowledge of the culture to which the child is born or belongs to.

Vygotsky was born into an affluent Russian family on November 5, 1896 in a small town in Belorussia. His father was a departmental head with a large bank and the large family of eight children was looked after by his mother. Vygotsky’s mother was a remarkable lady and gave up her job as teacher to pay attention to her large family. Vygotsky completed his primary studies at home and went to school only at the secondary level. He proved to be a brilliant student but was stopped from studying philosophy, a subject of deep interest, because of his religion. He joined a course in medicine but soon left it to study psychology. He also continued to study philosophy on his own and soon enough gained enough knowledge to lecture on the subject.

Vygotsky finished university in the early 1920s and started teaching at Gomel, from where he was to move to the Psychological Institute of Moscow. It was to be a short life and he died in 1934 of tuberculosis at the age of 37. In this short span of no more than ten years he produced works of immense brilliance. During these few years Vygotsky “ restructured the Psychological Institute of Moscow and set up research laboratories in all the main cities of the Soviet Union. He was to write over 180 papers, some of which are only now being published. With his students, Luria and Leont’ev, Vygotsky’s goal was to use Marxist methodology to reformulate psychological theories in accordance with Marxist thinking and how to address social and political issues confronting the new nation as it went from feudalism to socialism. (Offord, 2005).

Vygotsky fell into the bad books of Russian strongman Stalin over his work in paedology. The practice of paedology was banned in Russia shortly before his death. Many Russian psychologists found themselves dismissed or in concentration camps and Vygotsky’s works were banned in 1936 for a period of twenty years. There are no confirmed reasons behind Stalin’s sudden aversion towards child psychology and a number of theories, ranging from Vygotsky’s openness to public debate with thinkers like Freud to the dictator’s son doing badly in preliminary child psychology tests abound. In any case, the Soviet government effectively stopped the study of Paedology for many years in the Soviet Union and it was later revived only after Stalin’s death.

Vygotsky and his fellow theorist Piaget followed Constructivism, a procedure for the development of knowledge that is based upon an individual’s actual participation in critical thinking and the problem solving process. In this method, which falls within the ambit of socio-cultural theories, the individuals construct their own knowledge base through interaction with other individuals and apply it to the problem at hand. Vygotsky’s theories centered on his belief that culture was conveyed through the internalizing of social signs, the primary one being language, and that mental development occurs through external mediation and the use of psychological tools. An overview of his writings reveals three common trains of thought that are always present and form the basis of his thinking. These three themes are non sequential, inter connected and ever present

• The use of a developmental technique
• The relevance of social processes in the advancement of mental functioning in an individual
• The necessity of shaping human psychological processes and achievement of mental development through the use of mediational means or sources

Vygotsky reasons that it was essential to concentrate on the processes which lead to the development of higher forms rather than on the final product which arose out of the processes of development. All learning and imbibing of knowledge occurs in social and cultural contexts that are different from each other and thus cannot be replicated. In fact as social and cultural conditions change with the passage of time, so do learning opportunities and it is impossible and incorrect to lay down common guidelines for transmission of knowledge.

Psychological abilities can be categorized into elementary or higher functions, elementary abilities being ones like elementary perception, attention and will. Higher functions like abstract reasoning, voluntary attention and planning originate in human interaction and develop gradually as the elementary functions are transformed. Vygotsky argues that these higher functions, which depend for their development upon the transformation of lower functions, are shaped by the culture and social environment of the learner and that these particular transformations are effected through mediated activity. In fact, he says “the central fact about our psychology is the fact of our mediation”

[Mediation] is the key in his approach to understanding how human mental functioning is tied to cultural, institutional, and historical settings since these settings shape and provide the cultural tools that are mastered by individuals to form this functioning (Offord, 2005). Working on this hypothesis Vygotsky thus recommended the use of mediation in teaching literacy, in the sense that mediation will guide and evolve during the social interaction that will occur and the teacher will mediate learning rather than teaching to a captive student.

Vygotsky thought of language as critical for the mental development of children.

• The child begins to perceive the world not only through its eyes but also through its speech. And later it is not just seeing but acting that becomes informed by words
• Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.
• A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow
• A word is a microcosm of human consciousness. (Goldfarb, 2000)

Language worked as a tool, which enabled people to organize and structure their thoughts and was of thus extremely significant. Speech in its initial stages served the point of building social contacts but as soon as a child started talking aloud or to oneself, the structuring of thoughts could be said to have commenced and formed the first link between external speech and internal thought. According to Vygotsky, inner speech, which develops later “is not the interior aspect of external speech – it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But where in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings” (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 149). (Offord, 2005).

A child would thus, in the first stage use social speech to communicate with his parents and people around him. Once the child establishes contact with his culture, he would start talking to himself, which would progressively lead to inner speech and thence to the internalization of higher abilities. The theory of language being an important learning tool stems from the fact that children will not passively receive all the information coming towards him from their immediate environment without responding at all. Children will respond by deliberately seeking out words that they will be able to make use of in everyday life, starting from names of parents and moving on to other words, and then play with these words, speaking them out loudly and with delight. This continuous testing of the actual meanings of words, discarding some and adopting many more is, in Vygotsky’s perception, just the beginning of the process of curiosity and creativity and will propel children towards the quest for constant search of knowledge.

Vygotsky’s theory on the Zone for Proximal Development, (ZPD) states that the potential for psychological development is limited to a gap between what a child can achieve on his own in problem solving compared to what he can achieve under adult guidance or through collaboration with more advanced peers.

Vygotsky refers to what children can do on their own as the ‘level of actual development’. In his view, it is the level of actual development that a standard IQ test measure. Such a measure is undoubtedly important, but it is also incomplete. Two children might have the same level of actual development, in the sense of being able to solve the same number of problems on some standardized test. Given appropriate help from an adult, still, one child might be able to solve an additional dozen problems while the other child might be able to solve only two or three more. What the child can do with the help is referred to as the ‘level of potential development’ (Vasta, R., Haith, M.M., Miller, S.A., 1995).(Kristinsdottir, 2001).

The full development during the ZPD depends upon full social interaction and the more the child takes advantages of an adult’s assistance, the broader is its ‘Zone of Proximal Development’. It was originally thought that the person who could mediate and help achieve the higher level needed to be a parent, teacher or adult. It has since been found that learning to cover the ZPD can also occur if learning occurs in groups of similar individuals and are ready to assist each other. The concept of ZPD thus boils down to the gap between what an individual can do on his own and with assistance.

The term Scaffolding, introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross in 1976 to describe the interaction of the tutor with the child to achieve his potential essentially refers to the same mediatory interaction prescribed by Vygotsky to bridge the ZPD and the theories are thus broadly similar.

If adults wish to provide learning opportunities, they must evaluate the child’s present developmental level and estimate the ‘length’ of the ZDP. But, the child must be able to make use of the help of others; it needs the competence to benefit from the give-and-take activities and conversations with others (Bruner, 1983). Vygotsky acknowledged the maturational limits of the ZPD, but most psychological research has emphasized the role of the environment: parents and other adults who are ‘expert’ models and guides for a young learner. (Kristinsdottir, 2001).

Lev Vygotsky unfortunately died before he could convert his thoughts on educating children into actual methodology like Maria Montessori was able to do. A practical implementation of his theories would need the designing of educational curriculum to incorporate much greater interaction between teachers and students.

The use of scaffolding as an integral part of the teaching method, wherein the teacher is taught to modify the level of help needed with the progress and development of particular children would help greatly in development and be far more beneficial than adopting the same level of interaction for all children. The use of private tutors at home, as well as the proliferation of individual coaching classes for children, which has become prevalent in many parts of the world where classrooms are overcrowded and not conducive to education is proof of the necessity of appropriate scaffolding. Private tutors modify their teaching attention in line with the development of their wards and slowly give them more difficult assignments to solve. They also change the level of their help in line with the needs of their students and unknowingly serve specifically as scaffolding.

The designing of the curriculum would need to actively determine the extents of problem solving children are able to do by themselves. Problem solving assignments, which would form a strong component of the foundation used to impart knowledge would need to work on three modules, viz the extent of problem solving children can do on their own, the enhancement in problem solving achievable through mediation of seniors and the potential of taking on larger problems while working in groups of like minded peers. The use of the theory of zone of proximal development in a structured and progressive manner would thus work towards enhancing the problem solving skills of children with immediately perceivable results as well as for use in their future lives.

Vygotsky’s theories are brilliant in their simplicity and depth of thought and have now been accepted by most modern day psychologists as essentially correct and relevant even in the present context, with a few modifications.

Vygotsky’s theories in social development and child psychology postulate that a child’s biological and cultural development do not occur separately and in isolation from each other and that cognitive development is profoundly shaped by social interaction. Vygotsky’s theories are often compared with the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget.

The social development theory of Vygotsky challenged historically accepted teaching methods which focused on unilateral lecturing, two way recitations and memorising and postulated that teaching methods based on the social development theory would facilitate cognitive development more than traditional methods. Not many comparisons are made between Vygotsky and Maria Montessori, who belonged to the same period and also worked extensively with children’s learning methods. Both of them worked on improving the development of children and hoped, thereby, to improve future societies. Vygotsky had brilliant insights and his perceptive insights served as a foundation for entirely new disciplines. He died early and could not translate his theories into practical procedures for the implementation of cognitive development. Montessori however developed a specific and cohesive theory of child development from infancy into adolescence that found great world wide acceptance as a tool to maximise learning.

Cognitive development is too vast a topic and has numerous complexities to enable concrete solutions that can stand the test of time. In a rapidly changing world, the social and cultural changes by themselves, tend to make a particular theory, postulated at a certain point of history appear dated in certain respects after the passage of time. Nevertheless, the theories of Vygotsky appear as relevant today to the psychological development of children as they were when they were first propounded. A significant amount of research is currently in process in the west on Vygotsky’s theories and controversy and appreciation have both been essential parts of the dialogue.

Schools have traditionally shied away from promoting interactive environments in which children learn through two-way reactions with their teachers and peers and learning becomes a truly collective process, a reciprocal experience, so to say between the students and the teacher. His theory also points to the ineffectiveness and redundancy of teaching at levels of development that have already been reached and the necessity of learning remaining at levels higher than current developmental levels but within the zone of proximal development. Along with reciprocal teaching the use of scaffolding methods in which the teacher is able to engage the children, simplify their tasks and motivate them towards the desirable solution will help to optimize development. Classrooms would need to be redesigned to provide for an ambience where children and teacher work in small huddles. Space will be needed for interaction amongst the students and the teacher so that the classroom takes on the appearance of a learning community rather than a place where learning is based on recitative memory.

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