2.1.3 Relationship with environmentThe third founding pillar in Vygotsky’s writings is that of the child’s relationship with its environment. As explained above, the higher mental functions afforded by inner speech are central to the individual’s functioning in social interaction. Vygotsky was especially interested in developing one’s potential for future development. Indeed it was this interest that led him to conceptualise the ZPD.
Defined as “the distance between the actual developmental level, as determined by independent problem solving, and the level of potential development, as determined through problem solving in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978: 86), the ZPD was therefore used by Vygotsky to describe the individual’s current potential for further intellectual development. The metaphor he employed was biological – “the ZPD defines those functions that have not yet matured; these functions could be termed the buds or flowers of development, rather than the fruits” (Vygotsky, 1978: 86).
In contrast to prevailing tests of intelligence, which focused primarily on an assessment of the subject’s current intellectual development, Vygotsky believed that the ZPD might be assessed by the issuance of hints and prompts, and further questioning, during the administration of a conventional intelligence test. According to Vygotsky, therefore, the differential responses elicited from subjects of similar intellectual ability (conventionally defined, say, by age) through usage of questioning and hints, would therefore indicate corresponding differences in their respective ZPDs.
The responses and behaviours demonstrated by subjects in the ZPD are also characterized by a gradual increase of independence and autonomy, with respect to the assistance received from those with whom the subject is interacting.
Davydov (1995) has summarized five of Vygotsky’s ideas, as they apply to education. They are:
• education is intended to develop children’s personalities
• because the development of personality is linked to that of creative potential, one of the important tasks of schools is to provide opportunities for the development of creative potential
• teaching / learning and nurture require actual activity on the part of the learners; hence, they must be true participants in the process of teaching and learning
• teachers should be a collaborative process, with teachers as the guides and directors of student activity
• teaching methods should take into consideration individual differences among learners
Davydov’s summary highlights the currency of much of Vygotsky’s work to prevailing attitudes towards education. For example, Cazden (1979) was the first to point out that one of the most important educational implications that can be derived from Vygotsky’s activity theory is that of scaffolding. First introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross in 1976 in the context of a tutor-tutee relationship, scaffolding can more generally be conceived as the many different methods which are co-constructed by all parties in a social interaction to provide support and access during a learning task. This conception of scaffolding still honours that originally put forward by Wood, Bruner and Ross, in suggesting scaffolding in apposition to modeling and imitation, while at the same time takes into cognizance Cazden’s extension of scaffolding from dyadic adult-child interactions to an analysis of teacher-student interactions in classroom settings.
From the standpoint of Vygotsky, one primary takeaway for teachers is that care should be taken to emplace the scaffolding process within the learners’ respective ZPDs; that is to say, that the level at which instructions, questions and other prompts are used should be sufficiently ahead of the learners’ developmental level that they present a genuine intellectual challenge, while at the same time not present too great a challenge (Valsiner, 1987).
This latter point is especially important because, as postulated by Wood, Bruner and Ross, “comprehension of the solution precedes production”. This phrase, and its oft-quoted corollary from Cazden (1981) of “performance before competence” (which is itself an extension of Chomsky’s (1965) original distinction between the two) remind us that the tensions in a ZPD are still a rich source of academic debate. That is to say, the question remains (as Wertsch, 1979, 1991, has pointed out) the extent to which the teacher’s conception of the task goal is completely shared and understood by the learner, in advance of the scaffolding activity. This very partiality of perspective-sharing has been referred to by Rogoff (1990) and Wertsch (1985) as its intersubjectivity.
At the same time, Wood, Bruner and Ross were careful to point out that successful scaffolding does not merely result in task completion. Instead, successful scaffolding results in a better understanding of what was involved in the completion of the task (or, the actual process of production). That is to say, what was being scaffolded was not the completion of the task, but the child’s understanding of how to conceptualise the task, and of how to accomplish it (Stone, 1998). As Newman, Griffin and Cole (1989: 61) express it, “the interpsychological becomes also intrapsychological”.
Such evolutions in understanding, in which the learner is acting in anticipation of fuller understanding, come about through participation in what Stone and Wertsch (1984) term proleptic dialogue with the teacher-figure. Prolepsis is the mention of a referent in a conversation, prior to its actual introduction into the conversation. Through this foreshadowing, listeners are challenged to infer the referent for themselves. If executed properly, prolepsis results in a deeper understanding of the once-novel concept, due to the communicational tension that preceded it.
This relationship between the designed (the available and existing resources for making meaning), the designing (the process of shaping emergent meaning through re-presentation and re-contextualisation) and the redesigned (the outcome of designing which the meaning-maker has remade for himself) is described by the New London Group (1996) as a pedagogy of multiliteracies.
Of course, designing appropriate scaffolds is easier said than done, and a helpful distinction to make at this point would be that between what Brush and Saye (2002) term hard and soft scaffolds. While hard scaffolds are those which are planned in advance by the teacher, in anticipation of problems which might typically occur during the learning task, soft scaffolds are designed and implemented on a just-in-time basis. Soft scaffolds are therefore situation-specific, and require teachers to continuously diagnose the understandings of learners and provide timely support based on student responses.
The preceding few paragraphs have, to varying degrees of explicitness, implied that the protagonists in a scaffolding endeavour are generally the older expert figure and the younger novice. Increasingly, various authors (Griffin and Cole, 1984; Rogoff, 1990; Tharp and Gallimore, 1988) have questioned this assumption, and have drawn attention once more to the social and cultural contexts within which such scaffolding interactions take place.
For example, Tharp and Gallimore contend that much of what goes on in classroom exchanges between teacher and student follow closely the ‘recitation script’, in which teachers ask questions about the topic (to which they already know the answer), and then evaluate students’ responses (perhaps adding comments of their own). They point out that this mode of interaction is diametrically opposite to the co-construction of knowledge.
Rogoff has analysed how scaffolding takes place between peers, and has issued the reminder that not only can peers be valuable sources of learning, but also that adults play a much less important role than peers in everyday learning opportunities. In fact, Rogoff, Malkin and Gilbride (1984) have recognized that children can play a role in arranging for the kinds of support they need. They caution us to observe that children play a much more active role in their own development than is often recognized.
As a counterweight to what she perceives as the unhelpful separation of individual from environment in developmental research (see Wertsch (1995) above), Rogoff (1995) has proposed the strategy of thinking about sociocultural activity on three ‘planes of focus’. These planes are non-hierarchical and differ only in their granularity of focus (that is, in which aspect of the sociocultural activity they throw into the foreground); they are respectively apprenticeship (focusing on community processes), guided participation (focusing on interpersonal processes) and participatory appropriation (personal processes).
To elaborate, apprenticeship extends beyond traditional notions of craftwork to other kinds of relations found at home, work and school. Using the plane of apprenticeship allows the observer to focus on how individuals participate actively with others in cultural activities which have, as part of their purpose, the development of mature participation by the less experienced. As Collins, Brown, and Holum (1991: 6) express it, “in apprenticeship, the processes of thinking are visible”.
As for the plane of guided participation, this draws attention to the mutual involvement of individuals and their social partners as they communicate and co-ordinate efforts while participating in an activity. Such mutual involvement can take place at different temporal and spatial scales, from face-to-face communication, to collaborations which do not require co-presence. Because of this, and also because the guidance referred to in the term involves the direction offered by cultural and social values, guided participation has the potential to go beyond its Vygotskyian tenets, into a wide cultural variety of non-school-based settings.
Finally, the plane of participatory appropriation investigates individuals’ active efforts at transforming their own understandings about the culturally-valued activity in the ZPD, thus preparing themselves better for their involvement in subsequent, related, activities. Rogoff takes care to make the distinction between appropriation (which she in turn appropriated from Leont’ev (1981)) and internalization.
In doing so, she achieves three things. First, she shifts the emphasis from a biologically-oriented, somewhat static, metaphor to a socio-cultural evolving one; second, she highlights that appropriation is carried out by all parties in the activity and is not uni-directional; third, she also posits that it is the very act of participation by the learner that enables him to gain facility in the activity. In this, she echoes Stone and Wertsch (1984) in their contention that “the process is the product”.
An appropriate note to end on would be to use the terminology associated with the ZPD once more. To quote Newman, Griffin and Cole (1989: 153), “the task that is the goal is being accomplished interactively from the beginning. The teacher appropriates the child’s contributions into its own understanding of the task. There is always an opportunity, therefore, for the child’s actions to be made meaningful in terms of the goal”. Just one year later, the American management guru Stephen Covey (1990: 44) would express the same idea in his eminently more pithy sound-bite “begin with the end in mind”.
Rogoff’s (1993) use of the concept of participation was her attempt at highlighting the fact that, as understood by her, both teacher and student are participating in a joint cultural activity, as opposed to merely observing and reacting to each other. In her words, “communication and shared efforts always involve adjustments between participants to stretch their common understanding to fit with new perspectives. Such stretching to fit is development” (Rogoff, 1995: 153).
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