Vygotsky's theory in the classroom: Introduction

There seems to be a certain mystery in the current popularity of Vygotsky's ideas. Why does a theory developed in Moscow a few years after the Russian Revolution capture the imagination of European and American educators at the beginning of the 21 st century? One possible explanation of this puzzling phenomenon is that Vygotsky's theory offers us answers to the questions that only now we are finally ready to ask. There are several reasons, both historical and theoretical, that determined this late recognition of the relevance of Vygotsky's theory (see Kozulin, 1990; Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev, & Miller, 2003). Vygotsky's emphasis on the sociocultural nature of human cognition and learning was at variance with both behaviorist and later information-processing models that took it for granted that an abstractive individual is a natural agency of learning. While everyone would agree that transmission of culture from generation to generation is one of the major goals of education, the presence of culture in the classroom remained almost invisible. Students were perceived as individuals possessing natural functions of perception, memory, and problem solving that should be used for the transmission of learning. Culture appeared as an informative content of the curriculum external to the process of learning. Only when multiculturalism became recognized as an empirical reality of the European and American classrooms did educators finally discover the ever-present phenomenon of culture in learning. Once this discovery had been made it became apparent that Vygotsky's sociocultural approach is not limited to such obvious multicultural problems as bilingual students, but goes deeper into such phenomena as a culture of scientific reasoning as different from the culture of everyday cognition, the variety of literacy, and so on. At this juncture the questions first formulated in the context of multicultural education or science teaching started meeting answers offered by Vygotsky's theory. On the theoretical plane Vygotsky's educatiohal insights remained irrelevant as long as the predominant argument was between "traditionalists" who emphasized the transmission model of education, and "progressivists" who advocated discovery learning. Both "traditionalists" and "progressivists" assumed that cognitive and learning skills are the preconditions for the educational process. The argument was whether the students should receive their knowledge from the teacher in more or less ready form or whether they should actively and independently construct it. Vygotsky's position differs in principle because he places educational process as a source rather than a consequence of the development of cognitive …