Lev Vygotsky

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (according to the Belarusian transliteration of Cyrillic, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, in Russian, Лев Семёнович Выго́тский) (November 17, 1896, Orsha, Russian Empire, present-day Belarus-June 10, 1934, Moscow, Soviet Union) or Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and epistemologist of Jewish origin, one of the most outstanding theorists of developmental psychology, founder of cultural-historical psychology and a clear precursor of Soviet neuropsychology, of which he would be the greatest exponent the Russian doctor Aleksandr Lúriya. His work was recognized and disseminated by the academic world of the Western world in the 1960s.

The prolific nature of his work and his early death led to his being known as "the Mozart of psychology" (characterization created by Stephen Toulmin). The fundamental idea of his work is that the development of humans can only be explained in terms of social interaction. Development consists of the internalization of cultural instruments (such as language) that initially do not belong to us, but belong to the human group in which we are born, which transmits cultural products to us through social interaction. Culture, then, has a preponderant role in Vygotsky's theory: "individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social environment...in which the child is included (Tudge and Rogoff, 1989). The child uses some kind of 'tool' or 'sign' to turn social relationships into psychological functions".

Biography

He was born into a prosperous Jewish family near Vitebsk, the second of a family of eight children. Before his first year, his family moved to Gomel, where he grew up. In his teens he was a fan of theater and painting, he decided to rewrite his last name Vygotsky, instead of Výgodskiy > ("výgoda" means "benefit" in Russian), as it was originally. At just 19 years old, in 1915, he wrote an essay on Hamlet.

His time at the university between 1913 and 1917 was not without its incidents: he enrolled in medicine and just a month later he switched to law at the University of Moscow. After a year he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Popular University, content that had already fascinated him as a high school student. The Popular Universities were part of the framework of liberal educational institutions parallel to the oldest and most prestigious institutions linked to Tsarism. In this university, for example, women and people of any religion were accepted.He then returned to Gomel, with a difficult desire to fulfill: to teach psychology and literature. Precisely at that time, due to the October Revolution, all discrimination against Jews was abolished. From this fact, Vygotsky would begin to be linked to political activity. His various activities would make him the center of Gomel's intellectual and cultural activity. He taught Russian grammar and literature at the Labor School for workers; he taught psychology and logic at the Pedagogical Institute; aesthetics and art history at the Conservatory; he directed the theater section of a newspaper and founded a literary magazine. At this time he dedicated himself to reading Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov and Aleksandr Potebnyá (in: Alexander Potebnja, linguist in Kharkiv).

In 1919, he contracted tuberculosis and in 1920 he was admitted to a sanatorium (it was considered, due to the danger of the bacteria, that the patient had to be isolated from all contact). Sensing that his life would be short, he intensified his working spirit.

At the Pedagogical Institute, he created a psychology laboratory to study kindergarten children with learning delays. From here he obtained fundamental material for his book Pedagogical Psychology , published in 1926.

In 1924, Vygotsky married Rosa Nóievna Sméjova (died 1979), from whose union two daughters were born: Guita Lvovna Vygódskaya and Ásya Lvovna Vygódskaya.

Vygotsky presented in 1924, at the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Psychoneurology in Leningrad, an essay on reflexological and psychological research methods, a topic that he later delved into Consciousness as a problem of behavioral psychology. These investigations produced a strong impression on the Russian psychologist Konstantin Nikolaevich Kornilov (1879-1957), leader of the Marxist current in psychology and director of the Institute of Psychology at Moscow University.

Subsequently, Vygotsky worked at the Moscow Institute of Psychology together with Aleksandr Lúriya and Alekséi Leóntiev, who were slightly younger than him and who would later also gain worldwide recognition. They sought to reformulate psychological theory based on the Marxist perspective, inventing pedagogical strategies that would allow them to fight against illiteracy and defectology, a condition attributed at that time to children considered “abnormal” or “difficult”. ”, within which situations such as being left-handed or mentally retarded were included.

In 1925, Vygotsky created a psychology laboratory for abnormal childhood, later transformed into the Institute of Experimental Defectology of the People's Commissariat for Education, the same one that he would preside over.

In the spring of 1925, as a delegate to the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in England, he would take the opportunity to visit Germany, the Netherlands, and France.

Back in the USSR, he was admitted to the hospital due to a serious relapse of tuberculosis, at which time he finished his thesis Psychology of art, which he would defend in the autumn but would not be able to publish. He again was admitted to the hospital in 1926, where he would write an essay on "The historical significance of the crisis in psychology", a text that would not be published either.

After recovering his health, he would resume a long research activity with his students, arising from a new cultural historical conception of the psyche and teaching psychology, social sciences, education and defectology. However, these works were only partially published.

Vygotsky was an assiduous reader of Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Wolfgang Köhler, William Stern and Arnold Gesell, and published the prefaces to the Russian editions of these authors.

At the beginning of 1929, as his reputation grew throughout the USSR, he was invited to stay several months in Tashkent, to train pedagogues and psychologists at the University of Central Asia. In 1930, he conducted a seminar in Moscow with Lúriya, with Sergei Eisenstein and with the linguist Nikolai Marr.

In 1931, criticism began to appear against his cultural-historical theory, and the group of researchers from the 1920s divided. Lúriya, Galperin and Zaporozhets go to Kharkov, and Vygotsky regularly travels to Leningrad with Daniil Elkonin and Josefina Shif.

Always active, in 1933, he undertook a great synthesis of his work to respond to the various criticisms against him. This material would end up becoming "Thought and Speak". In the spring of 1934, he would be hospitalized and would dictate from his bed the last chapter of this work, published shortly after his death under the title "Thought and Language", with vetoes and cuts to which was submitted so that its publication was allowed.

In 1934, he returned to the hospital and died on June 10. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery (Moscow).

His work

Its bibliography includes 180 titles. Eighty of them have not yet been published. His most important work is Thought and Language (1934).

Their main specialist is James V. Wertsch; in Spain, Ángel Rivière.

He integrated the diversity of other fields of knowledge in a creative way: he explained with a novel meaning the role of society, culture and language in the development of the human being.

Some of his works were cut by the censorship from 1936. They were considered anti-Marxist and anti-proletarian by the Stalinist authorities. They never ceased to be mentioned in public forums, except for the criticisms of Kózyrev and Turko "Pedagogy at the School of Professor Vygotsky" and Rudneva's "Vygotsky's Pedagogical Distortions", nor his celebrated and referenced theories. Proof of the latter are the thirty references to his work in the 1940 edition of & # 34; Foundations of General Psychology & # 34; of Rubistein or his presence in the prestigious & # 34; Great Soviet Encyclopedia & # 34; from 1940.

Your work

In Vygotsky's texts there are several concepts of special relevance that constitute his theoretical positions, such as psychological tools, mediation and internalization. One of the most important concepts on which he worked and to which he gave his name is the one known as the zone of proximal development, which is included within his theory of learning as a path to development. On the other hand, his work contemplated other topics throughout his life, such as:

• the origin and development of higher mental functions
• the philosophy of science
• psychological research methodologies
• the relationship between learning and human development
• conceptual training
• the relationship between language and thought
• the psychology of art
• the game understood as a psychological phenomenon
• study of learning disorders
• abnormal human development (a branch called defect)

Vygotsky pointed out that intelligence develops thanks to certain psychological instruments or tools that the child finds in his environment (environment), among which language is considered the fundamental tool. These tools expand mental abilities such as attention, memory, concentration, etc. In this way, the practical activity in which the child is involved would be internalized in increasingly complex mental activities thanks to words, the source of conceptual formation. The lack of these tools directly influences the level of abstract thinking that the child can reach.

The internalization process

It is of special importance, in order to understand the development of higher psychological functions, the psychic phenomenon of «internalization» of the subject, whose process of self-formation is constituted from the gradual and progressive appropriation of a great diversity of operations of socio-psychological character, formed from social interrelations and in general from cultural mediation. In this dynamic of operations, the culture appropriates the same subject.

This permanent process of cultural, scientific, technological, evaluative internalization, etc., continuously revolutionizes and reorganizes the psychological activity of social subjects; the internalization that is manifested in a progressive control, regulation and mastery of oneself, behavior that is evident in the sociocultural environment.

This social and cultural origin of the individual and collective behavior of the subject is just one example of the importance that the phenomenon of internalization of norms, values, etc., represents for the preservation, development and evolution of society and to which Vygotsky defines it as the «law of double formation» or «general genetic law of cultural development».

This law consists of the fact that «...in the cultural development of the child, every function appears twice: at the social level, and later, at the individual level. First (between) people (interpsychological) and, later, inside (inside) the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, logical memory, and concept formation. All psychological functions originate as relationships between human beings.

In this process of internalization, we must not forget the fundamental role played by the «mediation instruments», which are created and provided by the sociocultural environment. The most important of them, from the perspective of his theory, is language (oral, written and thought).

Internalization is understood as the process that involves the transformation of social phenomena into psychological phenomena, through the use of tools and signs. This series of psychic transformations is synthesized as follows:

• an operation that initially represents an external activity, is built and begins to happen internally;
• an interpersonal process is transformed into another one of an intrapersonal character;
• the transformation of an interpersonal process into an intrapersonal process is the result of a prolonged series of evolutionary events.

Vygotsky considered that internalization refers to a process of self-construction and psychic reconstruction, to a series of progressive internal transformations, originating in operations or activities of an external order, mediated by signs and socially constructed tools.

The development of this phenomenon of internalization occurs in a first stage when the subject, from his birth, interacts with his peers in a specific sociocultural family and school environment. Experiences that gradually transform into mental processes.

This process of internalization is comparable to the work of Maria Montessori, when she called the mind of the child from 0 to 6 years old absorbent mind and compared it to a photographic print in which the mind it absorbs the environment, the customs, the social rules, the language, the culture of its time and place. See the book The Absorbent Mind or The Child: The Secret of Childhood.

The originality of this approach, based on a comprehensive conception of the individual and complex social relations, goes beyond the partial schemes presented by behaviorism and Gestalt, when Vygotsky formulated the existence of an inherent link between the interpsychological (social) and the intrapsychological (individual) plane, its relationship with internalization processes and mastery of mediation instruments.

This double relationship emphasizes the importance of the sociocultural environment and mediation instruments for the self-formation and evolution of higher psychological processes (thought, the capacity for analysis-synthesis, argumentation, reflection or abstraction, among others).

The transformation of an interpersonal process into an intrapersonal process is the result of a long series of evolutionary events and cultural appropriation that gradually guide individual and community behavior that manifests itself in actions in the surrounding sociocultural environment..

This process is representative of the Vygotskian dialectical theoretical projection. Insofar as it is dialectical, it begins in society and returns to it, but at a higher level. In this regard, Vygotsky states: «...the internalization of socially originated and historically developed activities is the distinctive feature of human psychology. The basis of the leap from animal to human psychology.»

From this analysis it is possible to infer that the phenomenon of internalization is a totally different process from the reproduction or psychic copy of external reality, and that, according to Alekséi Leontiev (a disciple and close friend of Vygotsky), "the processes of internalization they do not consist in the transfer of an external activity to a pre-existing internal plane, but are processes by which this plane is transformed."

In short, within the framework of Vygotskian theory, internalization processes are creators of personality, of individual and social consciousness. They are fundamental processes for the development of higher psychological processes in which mediation instruments participate, especially language.

Internalization is the precursor of new interpsychological functions. It is the genesis of the "zone of proximal development."

Therefore, it is not a simple copy or internal reflection of external reality, it is not a mechanism for receiving experiences of the subject in its relationship with nature and society, it is not a mechanical transformation of something external to internal. Contact with external action forces internal transformation (interior-exterior homeostasis of the subject is sought), which will develop according to multiple genetic or acquired personality factors, in a constant fluctuation and, therefore, impossible to generalize.

The psychic process of internalization implies that a social experience (the daily social language of the child at the preschool or school level) is gradually transformed into a language of intellectual uses (the daily social language of the child is transformed into thoughts), and its intermediate stage is egocentric language. To the extent of this improvement, the subject develops autonomy or independence from it with real, concrete objects, which begin to manifest mentally in its abstract aspect.

In this last phase of internalization, in the example of language and thought, the child has the possibility of making generalizations of a word or concept and, when he succeeds, the language has been internalized because now its function Has been modified.

Gaming psychology

Vygotsky's research on play and children's games is less well known, both as a psychological phenomenon and for its role in development. Through play, children make abstract meaning (meaning), separate from objects in the world, which is a critical feature in the development of higher mental functions.

The famous example that Vygotsky gives is that of a child who wants to ride a horse and cannot. If the child were less than three years old, he might perhaps cry and get angry, but around the age of three, the child's relationship with the world changes: "therefore, the game is such that its explanation must always be that supposes the illusory, imaginary realization of unrealizable desires. Imagination is a new formation, not present in the consciousness of the truly immature child, totally absent in animals, and representing a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action".

The boy wants to ride a horse, but he can't, so he takes a stick and straddles it, then pretends he's riding. The rod is a "pivot." "Action set to rules (rules) begins by being determined by ideas, not by objects (…). It is very difficult for a child to cut out a thought (the meaning of a word) from an object. The game is a transitional stage in this direction. At the critical moment in which a rod—that is, an object—becomes a pivot to extract the meaning of the horse from a real horse, one of the basic psychological structures that determines the child's relationship with reality is radically altered".

As the child grows, their reliance on pivots such as sticks, dolls, or other toys decreases. They have "internalized" those pivots in both imagination and abstract concepts through which they understand the world. "The old adage that a child's play is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and children is play without action".

Another aspect of play that Vygotsky referred to was the development of social rules that occurs, for example, when the child plays "houses" and adopts the roles of the different members of the family. Vygotsky cites an example of two sisters playing sisters. The rules of behavior in the relationship between them, rules that used to go unnoticed in daily life, were consciously acquired through play. Children thus acquire social rules, and also what we now call self-regulation, self-control. For example, when a girl is at the starting line of a sprint race, she may well be wanting to run away immediately so that she could be the first across the finish line, but knowing and the social rules that surround the game and the desire to enjoy it allow him to regulate his initial impulse and wait for the starting signal.

Theoretical concepts

Elementary psychological processes (PPE) and higher ones (PPS)

Among the examples of elementary psychological processes (EPP) we can cite memory and attention. On the other hand, higher psychological processes (PPS), which are characterized by being specifically human, develop in children from the incorporation of culture. From this point of view, social interactions and forms of semiotic mediation are the basic unit of analysis on which individual subjectivation processes are explained. Consequently, different cultural experiences can produce different development processes.

The PPS in turn will be subdivided into rudimentary and advanced. While the former are developed simply by participating in a culture, especially through oral language, the latter require instruction, which presupposes a particular institutional framework: the school. Written language and scientific concepts are examples of advanced PPS.

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) refers to the space or gap between the skills that the child already possesses and what they can learn through the guidance or support that can be provided by an adult or a more competent peer. This theory presented an important variant through the legacy that she left before the death of the Latin American educator Mercedes Chaves Jaime. The concept of the ZPD is based on the relationship between the child's current abilities and her potential. A first level, the current performance of the child, consists of working and solving tasks or problems without the help of another, with the name of level of real development.

It is this baseline level that is commonly assessed in schools. The level of potential development is the level of competence that a child can achieve when guided and supported by another person. The difference or gap between these two levels of competence is what is called ZPD. Vygotsky used the term scaffolding to refer to the temporary support provided by adults (whether parents, teachers, or teachers) to the child in crossing the Zone of Proximal Development. This last concept has been extensively developed by Jerome Bruner and has been instrumental in the elaboration of his scaffolding concept into his instructional model.

Thought and language

Another contribution of Vygotsky's work may be the interrelationship between the development of language and thought. This area, examined in his book Thought and Language, recognizes the explicit and profound interconnection between oral language (speech) and the development of mental concepts. He says that thought and word are totally linked, and that it is not correct to take them as two totally isolated elements, as theorists and linguists who only look for exact equivalents between the two elements do. Although thought and language have different genetic roots, at a certain point in development (around the age of two) both lines intersect to form a new form of behavior: verbal thought and rational language. "In the phylogeny of thought and language, a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech and a pre-linguistic phase in the development of thought are clearly discernible," Vygotsky argues. "Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form of behavior, but is determined by a cultural-historical process and has specific properties and laws that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and speech" (Thought and language, chap. IV).

In the ZPD it is necessary to think about the teaching-learning process and take into account the transition from signaling to the significance of the contents referring to the subject taught by the teacher. As a suggestion of contribution to the aforementioned, it is possible to use Piotr Galperin's formation by stages of mental actions, Mercedes Chaves Jaime's empty spaces in the act of reading, as well as Aleksandr Lúriya's organization of brain functions, with a self-regulated systematic didactic intention.

Within these contextual dialectical theories there are others such as Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, by Urie Bronfenbrenner, or the life cycle theory, by Paul B. Baltes, Lewis P. Lipsitt and Jacqui Smith.

Current applications in education

Currently, Vygotsky's philosophy is applied more and more, especially in educational establishments, where his techniques serve to promote personal growth in students. His works also promote an active approach to literature (Fidalgo-Suárez, Sevilla-Vallejo, 2020).

Further reading

Primary