This weekend I spent some time building a foundational understanding of Lev Vygotsky for our assignment on learning theorists, where we’ve been asked to collectively build a road map of learning theorists, by individually summarizing one of them. I chose Vygotsky for two reasons. One was that I had a picked up a book called Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology at a book sale the OU library had a month ago so I thought I may have a $2 leg up. The second is a little more embarassing. I actually referenced Vygotsky in a presentation I gave a little over a year ago. My exact quote was “This is a great learning theory by a Russian psychologist who’s name I can’t pronounce.” Ouch. Not knowing how to say his name is a good sign that I actually didn’t know what I was talking about. So, for me, this project is a redemption opportunity, as much as anything else, so I can not fall on my face the next time I decide to use Vygotsky as a reference.
I did a quick search at my library for more material on Vygotsky and was surprised on how few titles we actually had on him. I came quickly to understand why that was very quickly as I snagged a good starter book on Vygotsky, called Vygotsky for Educators, by Yuriy V. Karpov.
After a quick skim of some articles on Vygotsky, I noticed that he wasn’t an educator by trade, but rather a psychologist, and his learning theory development was developed more towards the later stage of his career, which is unfortunately cut short at the age of 37. Karpov’s book fit the bill of exactly what I was looking for. Something that was recent (This book was published this year. Of course when you find out later in the book that he died in 1934, this becomes less of factor), something that was education focused as opposed to psychology, and something in English and easy to understand.
Karpov explains Vygotsky’s approach to learning and development very succinctly:
“…children develop within their age-appropriate activities driven by their current motives. When initially engaged in these activities, however the children’s abilities and mental processes are not advanced enough to make it possible for them to perform these activities without adult help. Therefore, at first, these activities can be performed only as joint child-adult activities.” – Yuriy V. Karpov
Karpov stresses the need for adult meditation as the medium in which learning and understanding, particularly within the context language and early childhood development, take place. He does this in an interesting way. Rather than give a historical context for Vygotsky, he explores a few learning approaches in which Vygotsky differs from: nativism (the idea that your abilities are predetermined by heredity), behavorism (determined by conditions), and constructivism (determined by what Karpov calls “independent explorations”). To make things even less clear, it’s hard to tell exactly what one should call Vygotsky’s theory. Karpov refers to it as the Theoretical Learning Approach, others call it social constructivism, social development theory, social learning theory, etc. I’m not one to pick a dog in the fight just yet, but it is interesting to see Karpov steer clear of using a word that almost purposely omits the word “social.” From the book:
“…many contemporary advocates of constructivist instruction refer to Vygotsky’s ideas as providing a theoretical foundation for their instructional practices, which represents a gross misunderstand of Vygotsky’s theory. It is true that… Vygotsky stress the importance of social interactions as the context for children’s learning and development. He, however, insisted that social interactions should be used to teach children psychological tools rather than serving as a context for their constructing these tools by doing collaborative research and sharing their ideas within ‘communities of learners.'”
That quote was a big light bulb for me in understanding that these theories are not cut and dry. As with most things in life, his work is interpreted in many ways. On one end of the spectrum there was, oh, say guys like me who will take the work out of context to support one argument, and then others like Karpov who internalize the entire body of work to the point in which they refer to themselves as a “Vygoskyian.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I should probably side with Karpov’s perspective on this one.
But all of this does bring up a different point. Rather than be a riff off of Piaget’s constructivism or Bandura and social learning theory or Pavlov’s behaviorism there’s a good argument that Vygotsky does a good job of standing on its own. And it doesn’t have a terribly deep pool of theories that have been adapted from it, simply because his ideas where banned from public consumption shortly following his death and not translated into English until the 1970s-1980s.
As I continue to dive into this more, my main question is this: Is Vygotsky simply an adaption or natural evolution of some early theories, or is it one that stands on its own with little influence from outside theories. Hopefully my next reads will help me better understand what, if any, connections exist in the web.