A Brief Introduction to Vygotsky and the Social Nature of Learning

The following extract is taken from PETAA book Teaching with Intent: Scaffolding Academic Language with Marginalised Students, written by Dr Bronwyn Parkin and Dr Helen Harper.

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who was active in the 1920s and 1930s. Although he was a contemporary of Piaget, his work on child development was not translated into English until the 1960s, and his influence on Western education is still filtering through (Vygotsky, 1986). Vygotsky’s understanding of how children learn and the processes of internalisation in learning underpin the bottom right pedagogic quadrant (Bernstein's 4 Pedagogic Quadrants, 2000).

What follows is a summary of the elements of Vygotsky’s perspective that have been most relevant and important to us in our work with educationally marginalised students.

All learning is culturally embedded

Everything we teach in school is a social construction, selected for social purposes. The learning areas selected to be part of the curriculum are chosen because they represent bodies of knowledge that have power in the 21st century. Each of those learning areas represents a community of practice that exists in the wider world: the community of scientists, of historians, of mathematicians and so on. Each community of practice has its own way of viewing the world – members value different things, they have their own motivations and goals, they think and talk in distinct ways. They make different but valuable contributions to our world.

So teaching a science topic, for example, is part of an apprenticeship into the community of science. Its purpose is not simply to engage students in science activities, but to assist students to think and talk scientifically, to understand how scientists view the world, to value the things that scientists value, and to understand the centuries of scientific endeavour that precede us. Many students will already have been introduced to those values at home. For those students, what happens in science lessons has a degree of alignment with motivations, values and talk that are already familiar to them. However, we can’t assume that alignment exists for all students, particularly the educationally marginalised. The world views, values, motivations and topics of conversation of many families may well be different from that of the teacher and the middle-class students in the class. Somehow, the words that orient students to the world of science have to be part of our teaching. This means being explicit not just about what scientists do, but also why they do it.

Teaching and learning are two sides of a coin
The teaching in the bottom-right quadrant is child-centred. It is centred on students successfully learning socially valued knowledge. It’s the job of the teacher to create interest and motivation in socially valued activity, so our pedagogy must gradually shift from teacher-controlled to child-controlled as learning progresses. At the beginning of a topic, the talk can be teacher-dominated as we establish shared understandings in our classroom, but if our work has been successful, by the end of the topic, the talk is child-dominated, with students using powerful, scientifically valued language to describe, explain and argue.

Learning precedes development
Piaget argued that we had to wait for students to reach a certain stage of development before we could teach them new knowledge; that is, that development preceded learning. In contrast, Vygotsky argued that learning precedes development, and without that learning, students cannot reach the next stage of development. He identified a ‘zone of proximal development’, sometimes known as the construction zone, as a learning space where students work with the support of an ‘informed other’ beyond what they can do independently. In the school setting this informed other is us, the teachers. The significance of Vygotsky’s ‘zone’ for us is that if we set students tasks that they can already do independently, then they are not in that learning zone. They are consolidating what they already know. The opposite is also true. If we set students independent tasks when they really need the teacher to mediate learning, we have deprived them of their most valuable learning resource.

Language is central to learning
Thought and language go together. We internalise language and the thinking that it represents from what we hear and see around us, and then we use that language as an important tool for further thinking and meaning-making. Meanings can be constructed through hands-on activity, diagrams and models. But language holds the most privileged position in learning. It is the central most important learning tool because it enables students to distance themselves from hands-on activity, to generalise, develop abstract concepts, and apply their learning in new contexts.

Imitation is an important part of learning
As teachers, we often find rote recitation distasteful. We avoid asking students to parrot, or regurgitate facts. Yet if new scientific language is essential to learning, then students have to get it from somewhere. They get it from us. It’s called ‘appropriation’, or taking over new language as their own. Vygotsky argued that the first stage in appropriation is imitation and that it is an essential part of learning. We all do it as novice learners. It’s been described as ‘performance before competence’ (Cazden, 1981), so don’t worry if your students are imitating your words – that’s a good sign of learning. We only worry if students don’t move beyond that stage to a deeper understanding and more controlled use.
However, there is a difference between rote recitation and active, intentional imitation. To imitate intentionally, students have to understand the purpose and goal of the activity in which they are involved. It’s up to the teacher to share that with the students in the class. Then the language carries meaning and is not mindless repetition.

Concept development works in two directions
Concept development works from the bottom up and top down. We may begin with concrete and hands-on activities, but science requires that we transform those concrete processes into abstractions and concepts. To make sure that those concepts are strong, the process is reversed: concepts have to be unpacked and demonstrated in concrete ways. When students begin to use scientific language in our lessons, their understanding will not be strong. It will take many repetitions and interactions between language and activity for the concepts to be consolidated.

The Vygotskian approach to child learning and development once again gives teachers a central role in successful learning for students. His work reinforces the importance of students taking control of language if they are to develop scientific concepts. Scientific language becomes a central teaching goal, so that in turn it becomes a tool for further learning. His work means that, as teachers, we have to readjust our mistrust of language imitation. Instead we can recognise imitation as an important first step in learning and using powerful decontextualised talk, particularly for educationally marginalised students.