How do we learn? Answering this question has been, for many decades, one of the main challenges of Psychology as a scientific field.
If our species is the way it is, it is due above all to our ability to draw lessons from what is happening to us and disseminate this information to the rest of society. It could be said that learning and culture go hand in hand.
It is precisely this point of connection between the individual and the collective that has characterized the Sociocultural Theory of Lev Vygotsky an influential Russian psychologist who did most of his work in Soviet times. If you are interested in one of the most important theories in the history of Psychology, read on.
The historical-cultural perspective of Lev Vygotsky
In order to understand the basic ideas that give form to Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, it is first important to know how he understood the object of study of psychology, that is, that which must be investigated from the point of view of psychologists. It is this question that shapes their conception of how human communities learn from what happens to them.
First of all, it must be borne in mind that in the times of Vygotsky, the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the influence of positivism was very important in the scientific field.
This implied, among other things, that many of the scientists of the time understood that their activity should be as similar as possible to the activity of those engaged in the “hard sciences”: to decompose that which was being studied into its simplest objective elements, and to study them in isolation to ensure that their hypotheses and theories correspond to concrete natural events, and not with mere suppositions or imaginary entities resulting from abstract thought and detached from reality.
This cultural context made the first representatives of psychology put a lot of effort into studying the psychological from the observation of isolated events, expressed by individuals separated from their usual context and surrounded by a laboratory environment. Wilhelm Wundt’s investigations are an example of this.
Lev Vygotsky understood Psychology in a totally different way. Influenced by the Marxist philosophy that was propagated in Russia (and would become official with the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922), this researcher believed that the individual is indesligible from the culture and the historical moment in which he is immersed.
It is not only that people need the help of others to survive: it is that their way of thinking and acting depends largely on the cultural phenomena and historical inertia that run through the entire society in which they live. Language itself, which he believed shapes thought, is a cultural phenomenon something that cannot be created by the individual.
That’s why Lev Vygotsky’s intellectual legacy is sometimes called “historical-cultural psychology.”to highlight the fact that according to their perspective each individual is explained by the historical and cultural context in which he was born and has developed, absorbing much of the mental frameworks that are navigating through a given society.
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
What we call today Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory is actually the result of the joint work of this psychologist with Alexander Luria and a group of researchers strongly influenced by these two referents. This group was prolific in its areas of research addressing topics ranging from the psychology of learning to neuropsychology.
However, Lev Vygotsky specialized primarily in developmental psychologywhich explains how psychological predispositions and patterns of behavior evolve throughout people’s lives, from birth to death.
I understood that by understanding the way in which less complex psychological processes begin to unfold from infancy, adolescence and the early stages of adulthood, it would be possible to better understand how human beings in general think and act.
One of the aspects that motivated Vygotsky to research on this subject was access to the most rural and technologically backward areas of the Soviet Union, a political entity that in its first years of existence wanted to bring to all its territories a way of life “developed” and consistent with its ideas of progress.
In this way, Vygotsky proved that the inhabitants of those lands that still adhered to the traditional and to uncomplicated forms of organization thought in a very different way from the proletarians of the large urban nuclei of western Russia. In fact, they were unable to follow certain lines of reasoning, confusing categories and concepts.
This kind of experiences were interpreted by Vygotsky we are samples of the extent to which there is no human thought “by default”, a canon from which one can only approach or move away, but that what is really there are different historical and cultural contexts promoting ways of thinking and acting or very different ones. Just as living conditions and historical precedents in regions vary greatly, so does the human psyche.
Thus, unlike Jean Piaget, who understood that the motor of learning is based on an internal force that arises in individuals and leads them to explore the environment, for Vygotsky learning is explained rather from the context.
That is to say: from the collective and from the historical. The same patterns of thought and behaviour are not learned in a rich family as in a poor one, nor are the same cultural elements internalized in the Soviet Union of the 1920s as in Pericles’ Athens.
As a consequence, if psychology wants to help people learn in the best possible way, there must be a material and cultural transformation in their environment, on the one hand, and it must be provided with external support points from which to develop. This is what led Vygotsky to develop the concept of the “next development zone”..
The next development zone
The nearby development zone is a construct developed by Vygotsky as a proposal to create effective learning spaces.
We can define it as a context in which there is harmony between what a child can do and what he can learn from what he already knows, thanks to the help of an educator or a more competent pair (that is, that he already dominates what the other is beginning to learn).
In this way, Vygotsky focuses on the objective conditions we can create around each young person who is learning, to facilitate their learning without assuming that the will to learn will spontaneously emerge from them. Keeping a balance between the easy and the difficult, it is possible to present you with small challenges simple enough not to make you throw in the towel and complex enough to make you a challenge and a motivating goal.
The nearby development area is also an idea closely related to the concept of scaffolding which is still used today in educational and developmental psychology to refer to the accompaniment of apprentices or students in terms of the level of difficulty they need: what is already known is assured, making them not feel that it is useless and use it in later efforts to learn, and new teachings are proposed, areas devoid of “scaffolding”.