Vygotskys Sociocultural Approach

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Vygotskys Sociocultural Approach

• Vygotsky is concerned to study how people,
  through the use of their own social activities,
  by changing their own conditions of existence,
  can change themselves
• (Shotter,
  1993, p. 111)

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Lev Semenovich Vygotsky 1896-1934

• Entered medical school in Moscow (continued in
  Kharkov)
• Changed to law at Moscow (graduated 1917)
• 1914 Simultaneously studied philosophy/history
  with literature in private university
• 1917 - 1924 taught literature/aesthetics/history
  of art
• 1924 Methods of Reflexological and Psychological
  Investigations. Joined Institute of Psychology
  and founded Institute of Defectology
• 1925 Psychology of art Moscow Institute of
  Psychology Ph.D.
• 1924 - 34 Troika of Vygotskian school, with
  Luria and Leontev

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• How can I know what I think
• until I can see what I say?
• - attributed to E.M. Forster by W.H. Auden
  (1962)

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A fantastic story

• L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Languagetrans.
  Eugenia Hanfman and Gertrude Vakar, MIT Press
  1962
• L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, revised
  edition (ed. Kozulin), MIT Press 1986
• L.S. Vygotsky, The Collected Works of L.S.
  Vygotsky Volume 1 Problems of General
  Psychology, including the volume Thinking and
  Speech, Springer 1988

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• How shall the heart express itself?
• How shall another understand? (F. Tjutchev)
• I have forgotten the word I intended to say,
  and my thought, unembodied, returns to the realm
  of shadows. (O. Mandelstam)

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Janet Emig

• The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders
• Urbana, IL National Council of Teachers of
  English , 1971
• Writing as a Mode of Learning, College
  Composition and Communication 28.2 (May 1977)
  122 128
• Field Composition
• Method think-aloud protocols of eight 12th
  grade writers

• Writing as heuristic
• . . . writing is epigenetic, with the complex
  evolutionary development of thought steadily and
  graphically visible and available throughout as a
  record of the journey, from jottings and notes to
  full discursive formulations (Emig 1977 127)

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William Labov

• Language in the Inner City Studies in the Black
  English Vernacular, Univ. Pennsylvania Press,
  1972
• Field Sociolinguistics
• Method study of narrative syntax within a
  language community
• "Does 'Black English' exist?"
• BEV as a well-formed set of rules of
  pronunciation and grammar capable of conveying
  complex logic and reasoning rather than slang
• Standard/Non-Standard Schooled literacy/other
  literacies

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Mina Shaughnessy

• Errors and Expectations A Guide for the Teacher
  of Basic Writing
• (NY Oxford University Press, 1977)
• Background Open-enrolment into HE in the US
  following Vietnam war
• Field Composition
• Method Analysis of 4000 placement essays by 1st
  year UGs at CUNY

• Errors can reveal how people think and this
  revelation is useful to teachers
• Errors can be logical (cf. miscues) and conform
  to different rules that have developed among
  different language communities
• Learning as a constant and often troubling
  reformulation of the world rather than a steady
  flow of truth into a void

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A Language for LifeThe Bullock Report (1975)

• . . . man interposes a network of words between
  the world and himself, and thereby becomes the
  master of the world, Georges Gusdorf (Epigraph
  to Chapter 4 Language and Learning)
• a. The higher processes of thinking are normally
  achieved by the interaction of a childs language
  behaviour with his sic mental and perceptual
  powers. . . .
• b. That language behaviour represents the aspect
  of his thought processes most accessible to
  outside influences, including that of the
  teacher (p. 49)
• language has a heuristic function that is to
  say a child can learn by talking and writing as
  certainly as he can by listening and reading (p.
  50)

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L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Languagetrans.
Eugenia Hanfman and Gertrude Vakar, MIT Press 1962

• The nature of the development itself changes,
  from biological to sociohistorical. Verbal
  thought is not an innate, natural form of
  behaviour but is determined by a
  historical-cultural process and has specific
  properties and laws that cannot be found in the
  natural forms of thought and speech. (p. 51)

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L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Languagetrans.
Eugenia Hanfman and Gertrude Vakar, MIT Press 1962

• In terms of learning, writing makes a unique
  demand in that the writer must engage in
  deliberate semantics . . . deliberate
  structuring of the web of meaning (p. 100)
• LSV saw writing as an expansion of inner
  speech which he viewed as maximally compact
  writing was a mode that was maximally detailed
• James Britton, explicating LSV, defined writing
  as speech-cum-action (Britton 1971 11)

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L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Languagetrans.
Eugenia Hanfman and Gertrude Vakar, MIT Press 1962

• Word meanings evolve
• Mastery of written language has a profound
  effect upon the achievement of abstract thinking
  (Britton 1993)
• Learning as a sharing of the culture (Bruner
  1986)
• Research into learning as the study of how people
  make sense of the social world

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• The relationship between thought and word is a
  living process thought is born through words. A
  word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a
  thought unembodied in words remains a shadow
  (Vygotsky 1962 p. 153)

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Vygotsky and Consciousness i.e .how we think

• His big contribution understanding that we
  reveal how we think in how we act on the world
  he was particularly interested in language as a
  tool
• Give a child a tool and observe how they use
  it how they interpret the problem and how they
  act on it.
• Tools are material, conceptual, language (these
  are intertwined in use)

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Vygotsky and tool mediated action
Mediational Means
Object
Subject
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Elementary (natural) v. higher (cultural) mental
functions
Four distinguishing criteria 1. Shift of control
from environment to individual 2. Emergence of
conscious realisation of mental processes 3.
Social origins and social nature of higher mental
functions 4. Use of signs to mediate
higher mental functions
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Philosophical background

• Vygotsky appropriated ideas about how material
  tools mediate the labour activity and extended
  those ideas to include how psychological tools
  mediate thought
• He plays with the similarity between Marxs
  notion of how the tool mediates human labour
  activity and the semiotic notion of how sign
  systems mediate human social processes and
  thinking
• His point is that tools (conceptual and material)
  are not only used by humans to change the world
  but also they transform and regulate humans in
  this process

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Scientific and Spontaneous Concepts
Concept
Scientific Concepts

• Impose on child logically defined concepts
• Scientific concepts move downwards towards
  greater concreteness
• Evolve in highly structured and specialized
  activity of classroom instruction

Mature concepts
Spontaneous Concepts

• Concepts emerge from the childs own
• reflections of everyday experience
• Spontaneous concepts move upwards towards
  greater abstractness
• Develops in childs everyday learningenvironment

Object
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The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

• Originally a way of diagnosing a childs ability
  to learn
• Became linked with the idea of scaffolding in
  the work of Bruner
• For Vygotsky learning was a matter of
  internalisation and externalisation our
  relationship with the social situation of
  development changes as we learn

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What is his influence on Pedagogy?

• Mental growth is dependant on upon growth from
  the outside in, a mastery of techniques that are
  embodied in the culture and that are passed on in
  a contingent dialogue by agents of that culture.
  (Bruner, 1966, p.21)
• The heart of the educational process consists of
  providing aides and dialogues for translating
  experience into more powerful systems of notation
  and ordering. And it is for this reason that I
  think a theory of development must be linked to
  both a theory of knowledge and to a theory of
  instruction, or be doomed to triviality. (Bruner,
  1966, p.21)

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The contribution of Vygotsky to pedagogy

• tool and sign mediated action
• everyday and scientific concepts
• individual development from the outside in-
  internalisation and externalisation
• the social situation of development i.e. the
  leading activity

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Revealing Thinking in Language in Use

• For Vygotsky consciousness (how we think) was
  revealed in our use of both material and
  conceptual tools
• The use of language can reveal the concepts we
  employ and also our reading of the situation

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Activity Theory Leontev and object motive

• The main thing which distinguishes one activity
  from another, however, is the difference of their
  objects. It is exactly the object of an activity
  that gives it a determined direction. According
  to the terminology I have proposed, the object of
  the activity is its true motive.
  
  (Leontev, 1978, p. 62)

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Activity Theory Leontev

• A shift of focus from tool to object i.e. that
  which is to be worked on
• The ideas of object motive and leading activity
• The cultural construction of the object