The Context for Vygotsky ’ s Work

That is, they view Vygotsky in light of the culture of his origins and then with respect to the culture that has evolved from the foundation he provided. Their aim is to contribute to an understanding of Vygotsky’s work by contextualizing and historicizing his own career and then challenging readers to understand how his work has been taken up, and most productively could be taken up, by subsequent generations of scholars who claim his influence and further claim to apply his principles. I say “claim” because, in the view of many who are well-read in this scholarship, assertions of a Vygotskian perspective are often tenuous at best. I too often see references to selected sections of Mind in Society (Vygotsky, 1978) that do not suggest a richer reading or consideration of either his own more extensive writing or the body of work produced by people conversant with his career project. Vygotsky sought to resolve the crisis of fragmentation that he saw in the psychology of his day. The crisis remains, as evidenced by the abundance of psychologies and their different foci available in the 21st century. Vygotsky’s solution was to propose and lay the foundation for a comprehensive psychology of human concept development. His ambitious plan included three central facets: It was fundamentally genetic (i.e., developmental), it relied on the premise that frameworks for thinking are social in origin and are internalized through cultural practice, and it used the axiom that mental processes are mediated by tools and signs (Wertsch, 1985b). Wertsch summarized a Vygotskian perspective as being concerned with human concept development as volitional, goal-directed, tool-mediated action in cultural context. Vygotsky has been cited to account for learning and development in many scholarly fields. Wells (1999) numbers among many who are concerned that these citations are often ill informed. He has commented (referenced in del Río and Álvarez’s chapter in CCV) that the often-invoked zone of proximal development (ZPD)