Vygotsky and the Psychology of Education

Lev Semenovitch Vygotsky (1896 -1934) was a contemporary researcher and teacher of Piaget. He studied law, philosophy and history. Between 1924 and 1934, Vygotsky began his research in the field of Psychology and created his cultural-historical theory of psychological phenomena. The Belarusian psychologist aimed to reach the origin of the development of psychological processes during the history of the human species. This approach is called the Genetic Approach because it is based on the study of how human development occurs through culture, the environment in which it is found, and its social life.

Vygotsky was the first scholar to stress the importance of the environment during child development and during the formation of the human mind. He considered that the origins of conscious life and abstract thought were to be found in the organism’s interaction with the conditions of social life and with social-historical forms of human life. Thus, Vygotsky proposed that one should seek to analyze the reflection of the outside world in the subject’s inner world, starting from the subject’s interaction with reality. His methodology always linked theory to practice and was of paramount importance for Cognitive Psychology, given that it complemented the theory of the stages of intellectual development, which until that historical moment had been understood only by Piaget.

The Belarusian psychologist emphasized the importance of the student’s participation in the learning process, since participation shows the importance of the individual’s social insertion in their various stages of growth. For the effective maturation of the mind to occur, Vygotsky pointed to the need for close contact with the community.

The problematic relationship between development and education was a theme addressed by Vygotsky, as well as by other authors. The solution found by the author for the relationship between development and education was that the problem should be seen from two angles, the general and the particular: 1) learning comes with the subject from birth; 2) In this way, one can note the intrinsic relationship between learning and development.

Starting from formal education, development takes place on two levels, that is, on the actual level and on the potential level. Respectively, the first is the level at which the child finds himself when he manages to solve the problems proposed to him alone. At this level, consolidated maturity is evident. The second level is the potential, that is, the child only reaches a response with the help of others. This is the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development and relates to the difference between what the child can do alone and what he is able to learn to do with the help of someone more experienced. In this way, this very important concept in Vygotsky’s theory of learning, says everything that the child has the possibility of acquiring, in the intellectual scope, when the proper educational support is offered.

Vygotsky built his theory taking development as the result of a socio-historical process, giving relevance to the role of language and learning. The question posed by Vygotsky has as its center the acquisition of knowledge through the interaction between subject and environment. This means that the author conceives the development of the human being as marked by his insertion in a social group and, still, conceives the environment as what mediates the social self-other relationship. The mediated relationship occurs with the possibility of interaction with cultural symbols, signs and objects, or rather, mediation occurs when man does not have the possibility of directly accessing the objects, and he does so through clippings of the real – operated by the symbolic systems of which dispose. Thus, the construction of knowledge takes place with interaction mediated by various relationships. Knowledge is seen as a mediation made by other subjects, during the teaching and learning process and during the production processes of mediating instruments – which aim at carrying out specific tasks. Mediation characterizes, therefore, man’s relationship with the world and with the social other.

The social context has also come to be considered as a crucial part for understanding the teaching and learning process and will encompass the culture to which the student belongs; its material conditions as well as its social relations. Understanding the relationships that occur at school is necessary to point out the causes of student failure at school. It should be borne in mind that, between teacher and student, there is a relationship of interdependence in the teaching and learning process and, thus, when the student fails, the teacher also fails. However, it is worth noting that the student is not seen as just a product of his historical-cultural context, he is seen as an active agent in the creation of this context.

The epistemology proposed by Vygotsky was based on the work of the sociologist Karl Marx. The Russian author understood man as a result of the social and cultural relations of the context in which he lives. All of the subject’s learning is mediated by the social environment. The knowledge that is mediated by the social environment helps learning through the process of knowledge appropriation. The appropriation of knowledge, in turn, points to the fact that the student incorporates the object of knowledge and that he can operate this object mentally. The knowledge that was appropriated by the student becomes part of his psyche in a way that will guide him in his actions in the social and cultural environment, in accordance with his appropriations.

This briefly described process became known as knowledge objectification. According to this perspective, the school has the function of transmitting the academic content to the student, making him reflect on the political, economic and social organization of the environment in which he is inserted. At the moment when the appropriation of knowledge occurs, there is also the appropriation – by the student – ​​of knowledge about the historical process that constitutes society. This student’s consciousness changes and aims at this knowledge about the historical process that constitutes society and, henceforth, we have as a result the change of the social and historical context in which the subject is inserted. It is explained, therefore, because of what we said above that the student is also an agent in the production of the context in which he is inserted.

The theory of the Russian researcher broke with the view that was held about the subject during the teaching and learning process: both teacher and student are seen as agents of social transformation. Other factors were related to school failure, such as: the relationships that occur within the classroom; the social and historical context of the subjects involved during the teaching and learning process; the way Education is seen by the spheres of government; school management.

The changes that occur in man come from Society, Culture and History. Vygotsky proposes a new way of understanding the relationship between subject and object, during the process of knowledge construction, by taking the historical-cultural context as a reference. Thus, Vygotsky’s Historical-Cultural Theory is exposed, as well as his vision about the development of learning.

Bibliographic references:

DESLANDES, Keila. Psychology: an introduction to psychology Cuiabá: EdUFMT, 2006.

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