In his exposition of the concept of psychological tools, Vygotsky himself made clear that the means of semiotic mediation are not limited to speech. He also included: “various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps and mechanical drawings; all sorts of conventional signs; and so on” (1981, p.137). To these, we might also wish to add the various modes of artistic expression, such as dance, drama and musical performance. All these modes of representation are simultaneously means of communication and tools for thinking with, both when with others and when alone (John-Steiner, 1987). To recognize this is to enlarge considerably the range of applicability of the concept of learning and teaching in the zpd.
Broadening the range of modes of semiotic mediation considered also leads to the recognition that there are other sources from which learners can receive assistance in the zpd, in addition to deliberate instruction or the assistance of others who are physically present in the situation. As has been pointed out, all artifacts – both material and symbolic – are embodiments of the knowing that was involved in their production (Wartofsky, 1979) and can thus, in appropriate circumstances, make that knowing available to others, provided that the learning that is required is within the potential user’s zpd. While this is certainly the case with material artifacts, as when a new and more efficient tool becomes available for carrying out a familiar task, it is even more true of symbolic artifacts, such as written texts, charts and mathematical formulae. For those who are able to read them, such texts can provide a powerful means of self-instruction, as the reader appropriates the thoughts of others and makes them his or her own. However, as Lotman (1988) makes clear, texts are not only valuable when read “univocally”, in an attempt to reconstruct the author’s intended meaning; treating the text “dialogically” can be even more productive, as the reader uses it as “a thinking device” to develop meanings that are new not only for the reader but perhaps also for the culture as a whole. By the same token, it is probably through the dialoguing with real or imagined others that is an essential part of the process of textual composition that even the most knowledgeable others are able to continue to learn in the zpd.
Internalization: From Intermental to Intramental
The concept of “internalization” played a central role in Vygotsky’s theory of learning and development; in fact, it might be said to be the end for which interaction in the zpd was conceived as the means. As he put it: “all higher mental functions are internalized social relationships” (1981, p.164). Yet, central though the concept is, it is probably the aspect of his theory that has been the most hotly contested. For some, the concept simply lacks explanatory power; for others, it is the implied mind/body dualism that is unacceptable. But whatever the specific objection, the general thrust of this line of argument has been to question, and even to reject, the sharp distinction that Vygotsky seems to draw between internal and external, and between social (intermental) and individual (intramental) functioning.
It is not that individuals do not develop more complex (higher) modes of functioning with respect to the activities in which they engage, as they increasingly bring their actions under semioticized self-control, but that these modes of functioning are not independent of the social practices in and for which they develop. Neither in learning nor in use after mastery does it therefore seem appropiate to talk of a movement between inner and outer, such as is implied by the terms ‘internalization’ and ‘externalization’. This position is forcibly stated by Lave and Wenger in setting out their alternative theory of “legitimate peripheral participation”:
In a theory of practice, cognition and communication in, and with, the social world are situated in the historical development of ongoing activity. … First, the historicizing of the processes of learning gives the lie to ahistorical views of “internalization” as a universal process. Further, given a relational understanding of person, world, and activity, participation, at the core of our theory of learning, can be neither fully internalized as knowledge structures nor fully externalized as instrumental artifacts or overarching activity structures. Participation is always based on situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world. (1991, p.51)
More will be said below about Vygotsky’s ahistorical universalizing tendencies but, in the present context, the issue that most needs to be addressed is the sharp distinction that he appears to draw between social and individual and, perhaps even more important, the temporal sequence in which functions are said to appear on the two planes.
From a strictly ontogenetic perspective, it is not inappropriate to argue, as Vygotsky does, that higher mental functions are first social and external, in the sense that they are already implicated in ongoing social activity before any particular individual enters into the activity and gradually becomes able to organize his or her participation in terms of an individual construction of the relevant cultural practices. It is also true that, from the same perspective, an individual’s participation changes, over time, from a stage in which assistance and guidance are needed to a stage in which the same individual is generally able to function ‘autonomously’ and even to provide assistance and guidance to others. However, in using the term “internalization” to describe this transformation in and of participation, Vygotsky also appears to be proposing a temporal sequence on the microgenetic plane, such that, in learning, there is a stage at which the higher mental functions are external to the learner and a subsequent stage at which they are internal. The problem with this latter proposition is that it also implies a spatial movement in which what is learned passes from outside to inside the skin of the learner. And it is this that many commentators find objectionable.
The root of the problem seems to lie in Vygotsky’s tendency to focus on the process of learning solely from the perspective of the inner transformation that takes place as a result of the learner’s participation. And this leads him to set up an opposition between individual and social that seems to lose sight of the fact that, at every stage, the learner is necessarily a participant in, and therefore a part of, the community whose practices he or she is learning (Rogoff, 1990). The distinction between individual and social is thus not to be understood as a spatial separation between two distinct entities, such that functions can pass between them, but rather as the adoption of one or other of two different analytic perspectives on an individual’s participation in activity, where the activity is inherently social and cultural, although carried out at any time by particular individual participants. In other words, the ongoing activity can be seen either from the perspective of the individual participants acting with mediational means, or from that of the social practices in which they and the mediational means are involved (Wertsch et al., 1995). And this remains the case whether the component actions are undertaken solo or in collaboration with others. Both perspectives are equally valid, although which perspective is foregrounded will vary with the purposes of the analysis.
The value of the concept of the zpd is that it enables us to adopt both of these perspectives simultaneously. For what it highlights for us is, on the one hand, the reciprocity with which the participants adjust their manner of participation to take account of each other’s current levels of knowledge and skill in carrying out the activity and, on the other, the transformation that takes place, in the process, in their individual potential for participation. It is also important to add that, as a result of the ways in which new participants take part, both the purposes and the means of joint action are themselves constantly undergoing transformation.
Elsewhere (Wells, 1993 a), I have proposed that learning to dance is a particular case that can serve as an analogy for what is involved, more generally, in learning and teaching in the zpd. Dancing is a cultural activity that is far older than any individual participant and, although new forms emerge and are, in turn, replaced by still newer, the basic patterns tend to persist from one generation to the next. In learning to dance, therefore, the newcomer is joining an ongoing community of practice. To begin with, as the novice takes the first faltering steps, he or she is carried along by the rhythm of the music and guided by the movements of the other dancers (and even, in some, characteristically Western, genres, quite forcibly ‘led’ by his or her partner). Before long, however, the novice begins to get a feel for the dance and is soon able to participate on equal terms, both creating new variations that are taken up by others and adapting easily to those that they introduce.
In explaining this learning process, talk of internalization seems unnecessary; no knowledge passes explicitly to the novice from the more expert participants, as they move together with increasing synchrony. Rather, within the framework provided by the structure of the activity as a whole, of which the entraining movements of the other participants are just one part, the novice gradually constructs the organizing cognitive structures for him or herself and brings his or her actions into conformity with the culture-given pattern. In the words with which W.B. Yeats concludes his poem, Among School Children: ” How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
The Significant Other
Much of the discussion of the zpd has assumed that, in order to learn, the young novice needs the assistance of a more expert person who participates with him or her in the activity. Certainly, parents and teachers are the most important providers of guidance and assistance in relation to the child’s learning, in early childhood and even beyond. But they are not the only significant others in this respect. Vygotsky made this clear when he wrote: “learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers” (1978, p.90). Indeed, the current emphasis on ‘cooperative learning’ in North America can be attributed, in part, to the significant role that Vygotsky, as well as Piaget, attributed to peer group activities in fostering learning.
On page 86 of the same text, Vygotsky actually specifies “more capable peers” but, as has become apparent from a range of studies of group work (Forman and McPhail, 1993; Tudge, 1990), it is not necessary for there to be a group member who is in all respects more capable than the others. This is partly because most activities involve a variety of component tasks such that students who are expert in one task, and therefore able to offer assistance to their peers, may themselves need assistance on another task. But it can also happen that in tackling a difficult task as a group, although no member has expertise beyond his or her peers, the group as a whole, by working at the problem together, is able to construct a solution that none could have achieved alone. In other words, each is “forced to rise above himself” and, by building on the contributions of its individual members, the group collectively constructs an outcome that no single member envisaged at the outset of the collaboration.
Educators have typically had little faith in the potential for learning inherent in tackling problems to which no-one knows the answer. However, it must have been through the ‘pooling of ignorance’ in the face of new ecological challenges that our ancestors gradually developed the cultural resources of tools and practices that provided the basis for subsequent generations’ common knowledge. And still today, outside the classroom, it is often in conditions where no one member of the group has a clear idea of how to proceed that many of the most significant advances in understanding are made. It seems, therefore, for learning to occur in the zpd, it is not so much a more capable other that is required as a willingness on the part of all participants to learn with and from each other.
Telos: the End-Point of Development
Implicit in Vygotsky’s discussion of the “awakening” role of instruction in relation to development there seems to be an assumption that the development that results from learning can be treated unequivocally as progress. This is most apparent in the chapter on spontaneous and scientific concepts (Vygotsky, 1987, chap.6), where the mastery of scientific concepts is clearly presented as making possible a higher mode of mental functioning than is possible with spontaneous concepts alone. Here, “higher” appears not simply to denote later in the sequence of ontogenetic development, but evaluatively to connote a superior mode of functioning. The same assumption, transferred to the plane of cultural history, can also be seen to underlie the studies conducted by Luria in Central Asia in the 1930s in collaboration with Vygotsky. The presupposition on which these studies were apparently based was that mastery of the abstract and decontextualized modes of thinking made possible by the use of scientific concepts would provide a criterion for distinguishing between “primitive” and “advanced” societies (Luria, 1976) and, hence, for the planning of educational interventions designed to bring all societies to the advanced level of intellectual functioning of which they were potentially capable.
As Bruner (1996) and Wertsch and Tulviste (1991), among others, have argued, such a view can be seen as consistent with Vygotsky’s evolutionary approach to culture, and also with the revolutionary ideological spirit in which he conceived his task of reconstructing psychology as a basis for emancipatory action and as a more adequate foundation for the study of human behavior. In the decades since his death, however, there have arisen a number of grounds for challenging what many now consider to be an over-optimistic belief in the universal superiority of scientific rationalism and an unquestioning acceptance of the progressive and benign consequences of schooled instruction. Here I shall consider three that have, in recent years, increasingly been voiced.
The first problem concerns the assumption of the superiority in all situations of thinking based on scientific as opposed to everyday concepts. Habermas (1971), for example, writing from the perspective of social theory, criticizes the increasing hegemony of technical rationality in Western societies, arguing that, although it has a crucial role to play in contemporary life, it must be complemented by both practical and critical-emancipatory modes of knowing. A somewhat similar challenge has come from cultural anthropologists, whose studies of non-Western cultures have led them to reject the view that treats the trajectory of European cultural history as the point of reference for evaluating other cultures. Within Western societies, too, the influx of immigrants from a wide range of different cultures has led to a de facto multiculturalism that is demanding a reevaluation of the assumed superiority of white, male, middle-class values and, hence, also of the technical rationality on which it is based.
Nevertheless, it is not clear that the ways in which Vygotsky used the terms “primitive” and “advanced” when explaining and comparing the development of mental functions in the three different contexts of general human history, contemporary preliterate cultures, and children in contemporary Western societies, really do lay him open to the charge of Eurocentrism , as Wertsch and Tulviste (1992) have suggested. As Minick (1987) points out, Vygotsky’s theory was itself constantly evolving, as he read and critiqued the work of others and carried out his own research, with the result that his written oeuvre is not internally consistent in this respect; furthermore, as Scribner (1985) shows, Vygotsky was emphatic in rejecting a recapitulationist position. The intellectual development of a child in any contemporary culture through the appropriation of resources already in use in his or her social environment, he insisted, constitutes a very different kind of development from that which was involved in the gradual creation of these resources over many generations in the phylogenetic development of the species. In fact, Scribner argues, Vygotsky’s habit of using the term “primitive” when comparing these different situations can best be understood, not as substantively equating them, but as a methodological heuristic that he used at various points in his theory-building procedure.
A second criticism is based on the primacy given to cognition in much of the Vygotskyan-inspired study of human development, and the consequent neglect of the social, affective and motivational dimensions. However, the responsibility for this imbalance should not be laid at Vygotsky’s door; it is due much more to the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1960s and the central role that the metaphor of the mind as computer has played in recent work in cognitive science. That Vygotsky had a much more comprehensive and balanced conception of development is apparent from the final section of Thinking and Speech. Thought has its origins in the motivating sphere of consciousness, he wrote, “a sphere that includes our inclinations and needs, our interests and impulses, and our affect and emotion. … A true and complex understanding of another’s thought becomes possible only when we discover its real, affective-volitional basis” (1987, p. 282 ). To which he might have added the converse, namely that “feeling is forever given shape through thought”, which is structured by our cultural forms of understanding (Rosaldo, 1984, p.143). A further indication of the holistic nature of Vygotsky’s mature understanding of development is to be found in the extension of his ideas in the work of his colleague, Leont’ev (1978), on motivation, emotion aand personality.