Supplementary Reading: The influence of L. S. Vygotsky on education theory, research, and practice
- With the changing of the Russian government to Gorbachev in the 1980’s, the need for Educational reform was evident to fit with the changing societal values
- In the past students were trained to fit the Communist Regime and were regarded as “cogs” to fit into the machinery of the Russian military
- In 1988, a group of psychologists and educators began to initiate educational reform, based on the ideas and theories first introduced by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist
- When Vygotsky first wrote of his thoughts on education in the 1930’s, his ideas directly opposed the totalitarian Communist Regime of Stalin. While he was not arrested for contradicting the current governmental ideals, his book was banned and his ideas were oppressed until the early 1990’s when his book “Pedagogical Psychology” was finally published for mass consumption
- Vygotsky’s main reforms on education involved the following five ideas;
- that it must develop the personality of the student,
- in order to do this, conditions must be created for students to be creative,
- students must be active in their own education,
- teachers guide the activity of students, but should not dictate it,
- that learning for each student is individual, therefore the teaching for each student cannot be uniform.
- Vygotsky introduced the concept of the “zone of proximal development” – the ‘space’ between where a learner is guided in solving a problem and where the learner solves a problem independent
Davydov, V. V. (1995). The influence of L. S. Vygotsky on education theory, research, and practice. Educational Researcher, 24, 12-21. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1176020