Lev Vygotsky

187 Pages·2014·0.741 MB·English

by  Veer, René van der, Vygotskiĭ, Lev Semenovich

Lev Vygotsky
Titles in the Bloomsbury Library of Educational Thought Series:
St Thomas Aquinas, Vivian Boland OP Maria Montessori, Marion O’Donnell
Aristotle, Alexander Moseley A. S. Neill, Richard Bailey
St Augustine, Ryan N. S. Topping John Henry Newman, James Arthur and
Pierre Bourdieu, Michael James Grenfell Guy Nicholls
Jerome Bruner, David R. Olson Robert Owen, Robert A. Davis and Frank
O’Hagan
Confucius, Charlene Tan
R. S. Peters, Stefaan E. Cuypers and
John Dewey, Richard Pring
Christopher Martin
Michel Foucault, Lynn Fendler
Jean Piaget, Richard Kohler
Paulo Freire, Daniel Schugurensky
Plato, Robin Barrow
John Holt, Roland Meighan
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jürgen Oelkers
John Locke, Alexander Moseley Rudolf Steiner, Heiner Ullrich
Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio Emilia Leo Tolstoy, Daniel Moulin
Experience, Kathy Hall, Mary Horgan, Lev Vygotsky, René van der Veer
Anna Ridgway, Rosaleen Murphy, Maura E. G. West, James Tooley
Cunneen and Denice Cunningham Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan Laird
Series Editor: Richard Bailey is a writer and researcher in education and sport. A former
teacher in both primary and secondary schools and a teacher trainer, he has been Professor
at a number of leading Universities in the UK. He now lives and works in Germany.
Members of the Advisory Board
Robin Barrow, Professor of Philosophy, Gary McCulloch, Head of Department
Simon Fraser University, Canada. of Humanities and Social Sciences at
the Institute of Education, University of
Peter Gronn, Professor of Education,
London, UK.
Head of Faculty, University of
Jürgen Oelkers, Professor of Education at
Cambridge, UK.
the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Kathy Hall, Professor of Education and
Richard Pring, Emeritus Professor at the
Head of the School of Education at
Department of Education, and Emeritus
University College Cork, Ireland.
Fellow of Green Templeton College,
Stephen Heyneman, Professor of University of Oxford, UK.
International Educational Policy at Harvey Siegel, Professor and Chair of the
the College of Education and Human Department of Philosophy, University of
Development, Vanderbilt University, USA. Miami, USA.
Yung-Shi Lin, President Emeritus and Richard Smith, Professor of Education,
Professor, Department of Education and University of Durham, UK.
Institute of Graduate Studies, Taipei Zhou Zuoyu, Professor, Faculty of
Municipal University of Education, Education, Beijing Normal University,
Republic of China, Taiwan. People’s Republic of China.
Lev Vygotsky
RENE´ VAN DER VEER
BClooonmtinsubuurmy LLiibbrraarryy ooff EEdduuccaattiioonnaall TThhoouugghhtt
Series Editor: Richard Bailey
Volume 10
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2007 by Continuum International Publishing Group
Paperback edition first published 2014 by Bloomsbury Academic
© René van der Veer, 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
René van der Veer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can
be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: PB: 978-1-4725-0492-0
ePUB: 978-1-4411-8127-5
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Veer, René van der, 1952–
Lev Vygotsky/René van der Veer.
p. cm. – (Continuum library of educational thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-8409-3 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-8409-3 (hardcover)
1. Vygotskii, L. S. (Lev Semenovich), 1896–1934. 2. Educational psychology.
3. Developmental psychology. I. Title. II. Series.
LB1051.V44 2007
370.15–dc22
2007018517
Typeset by Aptara Books Ltd.
Contents
Foreword vii
SeriesEditor’sPreface x
Preface xii
Introduction 1
Part1 IntellectualBiography 11
1 LevVygotsky 13
NotestoPart1 29
Part2 CriticalExpositionofVygotsky’sWork 33
2 EarlyWritings 35
3 CreatingCultural-historicalTheory 48
4 TheZoneofProximalDevelopment 75
5 Cross-culturalEducation 97
NotestoPart2 106
Part3 TheReception,InfluenceandRelevanceofVygotsky’s
WorkToday 111
6 ContemporaryEducationalResearch 113
7 Conclusions 136
NotestoPart3 140
Bibliography 143
NameIndex 161
SubjectIndex 165

Foreword
Whetherhewasanaturalproductoranartifactoftwentieth-century
Russian-Soviet psychology, Lev Vygotsky undoubtedly affected the
landscape of modern psychology. In Vygotsky’s Educational Thinking,
Rene´ van der Veer examines the intellectual and affective roots of
Vygotsky as a thinker, delineating for the reader his interpretation
ofVygotskyasboththemanandanti-manofhistime,andsketching
Vygotsky’sprofoundcontributiontopsychology.
AsVanderVeersuggests,historiansofsciencemight‘...neverbe
able to fully explain’ (p. 4) the popularity of Vygotsky’s ideas in the
West.Andthisveryinexplicabilityis,atleastinpart,whatissoattrac-
tive about Vygotsky’s writings. Like any unsolved mystery, Vygotsky’s
creativityhasattractedmanyWesternandRussianresearchers.
Inhisnewvolume,VanderVeer’schronological,verticalperspec-
tive starts with Vygotsky’s biography (Chapter 1), explores his early
writings(whicharelessknowntotheWest)(Chapter2),investigates
the roots of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory (Chapter 3), pays
particularattentiontotheconceptofthezoneofproximaldevelop-
ment (Chapter 4), presents Vygotsky’s ideas on cultural psychology
(Chapter5),andendswithasummaryofVygotsky’simpactonmod-
ern psychology (Chapter 6). The book focuses primarily on Vygot-
sky’s contributions to education, but the author extensively covers a
number of general topics in Vygotsky’s writing (e.g. the concepts of
cultural tool and higher mental function), providing an overview of
Vygotsky’sworkingeneral.VanderVeer’sbookisavaluableaccount
ofVygotsky’sworkandwillbehelpfulnotonlytohistoriansofpsychol-
ogyandeducation,butalsotostudents,researchersandpractitioners
inbothfields.
As Vygotsky was a major figure in Russian academic history,
this is not the first book to profile him. Russian authors such as
viii Foreword
Andre(cid:6)Bruwlinski(cid:6)[AndreyBrushlinsky],Aleksandr(cid:15)tkind
[AleksandrEtkind],Valeri(cid:6)Petuhov[ValeryPetukhov],Andre(cid:6)
Puzyre(cid:6) [Andrey Puzyrey], Irina Sirotkina [Irina Sirotkina],
Vladimir Umrihin [Vladimir Umrikhin] and Mihail (cid:29)row-
evski(cid:6) [Mikhail Yaroshevsky], among others, have all offered
accounts of Vygotsky. Their accounts, although different from each
other, offer a more horizontal perspective, representing Vygotsky’s
creativityasapartofthe‘sharedconsciousness’,‘theRussianthought’
of the early twentieth century. These authors, however, wrote pri-
marily in Russian, which makes their writings rather inaccessible to
psychologists and educators of the West. This is why Van der Veer’s
volume is especially important – it connects Russian and Western
viewsofVygotsky’screativity.
Asisthecasewithanyhistoricalfigure,differentaccountsofVygot-
sky’slifepresentsomediscrepanciesindetails,buthowimportantare
such minor details? Such discrepancies are only indications of how
complextherealityinwhichweliveis–thewholecountrywitnessed
70-plus years of socialism in the former USSR, and there is still no
uniform interpretation of what happened, why it happened, why it
lastedaslongasitdid,andmostimportantly,whatlessonsshouldbe
learned from those years. Yet, there are some commonfeatures that
unifyallofVygotsky’sstudents.Herearethreeselectedones.
First,readersofVygotskyagreeonhisinspiredandinspiringviewof
ahumanbeingasacreatorandmodifierofknowledge.ForVygotsky,
a child is not a mechanical structure that acts as prescribed by some
program while moving through the stages of development. Rather,
thechildisanactive‘creator’ofherhighermentalfunctions,because
each and every one of them needs to be constructed from innate
building blocks with mental tools and cultural guidelines suggested
byadults.Thisactofconstructionishumaninitsessenceandunique
foreverychild.Thishumanisticinterpretationofdevelopmentwhere
due respect is paid to both nature and nurture, with the former
being ‘the material’ and the latter being ‘the guidelines’, insists on
the magic of a merge and unification of the two occurring in each
individual child inimitably. Vygotsky applauds each and every child,
whether typically developing or not, for his or her construction of a
distinctiveself.
Foreword ix
Second, there is a consensus on the breadth of Vygotsky’s creativ-
ityandhiscontributiontomanysubfieldsofpsychologyandhuman
thought.AnybookonVygotskyisnecessarilylimited,simplybecause
he wrote thousands of printed pages on different subjects. What is
also important to note is the heterogeneity, both chronological and
concurrent,ofVygotskyasathinker.Hiswritingsarecontradictoryin
places, and his self-reflections on a ‘crisis in psychology’ capture his
internaltensionandthetensioninthefield,implyingtheinevitabil-
ityandabsolutenecessityofthistensionforthedevelopmentofpsy-
chology as a field. Psychology was in crisis before Vygotsky, during
Vygotsky,afterVygotsky,andfortheforeseeablefuture.ForVygotsky,
whenthecrisisisover,psychologyasascienceisdead.
Third, Vygotsky’s creativity is not characterized by a large body
of empirical research, but rather by brilliant experimental ideas.
AlthoughVygotskydidnothavethechancetoimplementandevalu-
atehisownideas,othershaveandstilldo.WhatisspecifictoVygotsky’s
writingsisthisflavorofrichnessoftestablehypotheses.Hegenerated
many ideas and tested very few. That is why reading Vygotsky is pro-
ductive;onealwayswalksawaywithathingortwototry.
Thus,therewillalwaysbefollowersofVygotsky,andVanderVeer’s
account of the man and his ideas will serve them well. In essence,
Van der Veer does to Vygotsky’s creativity what Vygotsky himself did
to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – he drew ‘the reader’s attention to one
possibleandadmittedlysubjectiveinterpretation’ofthework‘while
preservingitsmysteriouscharacter’(seep.37ofcurrentvolume).
ElenaL.Grigorenko
YaleUniversity,USA
MoscowStateUniversity,Russia