Preamble

It is now more than a quarter of a century since the study reported in the first edition of this book was completed. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, no study of comparable scale has since been carried out that casts doubt on the original findings. I shall therefore retain most of the earlier chapter. However, I shall take the opportunity, in the final part of the current chapter, to say something about the collaborative action research with classroom teachers in which I have recently been engaged in the attempt to create richer opportunities for children to construct knowledge together through more dialogic forms of classroom interaction.

It has always been assumed that language plays a major role in formal education. And with good reason. Most of what is taught in schools is transmitted either through teachers' oral presentation or through textbooks and reference works, and when assessments of educational attainment are made they are typically made through the medium of questions and answers in either the spoken or the written mode. It seems self‐evident, therefore, that to succeed in school a pupil must have an adequate command of the linguistic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Although correct as far as it goes, such a concept of the role of language in education is seriously misleading, since it leaves out of account the essentially interactive nature of linguistic communication.

The centrality of language has run like a leitmotiv through the exploration of knowing and knowledge in the preceding chapter. Here I want to focus on it more directly, first by setting out the arguments for treating it as the very essence of education and, second, by considering in more detail the relationship between discourse and knowing. I shall then consider some of the implications of the preceding arguments for the discourse through which so many of the daily practices of learning and teaching are enacted in the classroom. Briefly, I shall propose that classrooms should become communities of inquiry, in which the curriculum is seen as being created emergently in the many modes of conversation through which teacher and students dialogically make sense of topics of individual and social significance, through action, knowledge building and reflection.

The Role of Language in Human Development

Vygotsky's contribution to our understanding of the central role of language in human development has already been spelled out in some detail in Chapter. It rests on the fruitful analogy he drew between material artifacts and signs: both function as tools to mediate joint, productive activity. Viewed in this way, language and other semiotic systems can be thought of as “psychological tools” that, through their inclusion in activity, radically transform participants' orientations both to the material situation and to their coparticipants.

From a phylogenetic perspective, we have already seen this transformative effect in the account that was offered, in Chapter 2, of the emergence of the different modes of knowing in the evolution from primate to contemporary humans.

A Social Constructivist Model of Learning and Teaching

Vygotskian theory suggests that the principal goal of education is to provide an environment in which students, however diverse their background, engage collaboratively in productive, purposeful activities which enable them to:

• take over the culture's tool-kit of skills, knowledge and values so that they are able to participate effectively in the practices of the larger society

• develop the disposition to act creatively, responsibly and reflectively in achieving their own potential and constructing a personal identity

These aims seem most likely to be achieved by:

1. Creating a classroom community which shares a commitment to caring, collaboration, and a dialogic mode of making meaning

2. Organizing the curriculum in terms of broad themes for inquiry that encourage a willingness to wonder, to ask questions, and to collaborate with others in building knowledge, both practical and theoretical, to answer them

3. Negotiating goals that:

• challenge students to develop their interests and abilities

• are sufficiently open-ended to elicit alternative possibilities for consideration

• involve the whole person – feelings, interests, personal and cultural values, as well as cognition

• provide multiple opportunities to master the culture's tools and technologies through purposeful use

• encourage both collaborative group work and individual effort;

• give equal value to thoughtful processes and excellent products.

1. Ensuring that there are occasions for students to:

• use a variety of modes of representation as tools for achieving joint and individual understanding

• present their work to others and receive critical, constructive feedback

• reflect on what they have learned, both individually and as a community

• receive guidance and assistance in their zones of proximal development.

There can be little doubt that, in the English-speaking world at least, it is the “zone of proximal development” that has been Vygotsky's most important legacy to education. Indeed, it is the only aspect of Vygotsky's genetic theory of human development that most teachers have ever heard of and, as a result, it is not infrequently cited to justify forms of teaching that seem quite incompatible with the theory as a whole. This centenary conference therefore seems an appropriate occasion to review Vygotsky's exposition of the zpd and to consider the ways in which this seminal concept has been modified and extended in subsequent work.

Although the zpd is often said to be a central concept within his theory, its explicit formulation appeared quite late in Vygotsky's writings and then in two rather different contexts. One version, translated into English as “Interaction between Learning and Development” (chapter 6 of Mind in Society, 1978), occurred in a posthumously published collection of essays entitled Mental Development of Children and the Processes of Learning (Vygotsky, 1935). Here, the immediate context in which the concept of the zpd is presented is that of the assessment of children's intellectual abilities and, more specifically, as a more dynamic conception of intellectual potential than that represented by an IQ score. Vygotsky defines the zone of proximal development as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (1978, p. 86).