L.S. Vygotsky:
- Beginning on Page 80 of the reading, three theoretical positions, regarding the relationship between learning and development, are posited, which of the the theoretical postulations seems most plausible? And contiguously, which of the three positions (re-conceptualizations) would be most efficacious with regard to pedagogy?
- How does the Zone of Proximal Development represent a paradigmatic shift in the way in which the relationship between learning and development is conceptualized?
- Vygotsky argues that “writing must be relevant to life (pp. 118 of reading)”, what does he mean by this? Is this argument consistent with conceptualizations of culturally relevant pedagogy?
- According to Vygotsky what is the difference between (merely) teaching written letters and actually teaching written language?
The Zone of Proximal Development represented a shift in the way that learning and development were conceptualized together by emphasizing that the role of education was to help children learn through experiences that were within their ZPD. Vygotsky came up with ZPD to argue that intelligence should not be measured by what students know but by how they solve problems, with or without the help of an adult. His concept of ZPD argued that child development occurs as they learn from following the examples of adults around them and gradually become able to do certain tasks/problems on their own. More specifically, it stated that children should learn by being given experiences that were within their ZPD, in other words, problems that they would be able to solve with just the right amount of help from an adult to get them started in the right direction but which they would ultimately be able to do independently. This was a shift in the way that the relationship between learning and development was conceptualized because it placed an emphasis on a child's proximal development as being crucial to their learning - ZPD states that the two (development and learning) go hand in hand. Vygotsky's actual defintion of ZPD explains it 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." In this definition he shows that individual levels of development play an important factor in how much students can learn, and cannot be overlooked in the way they are taught, in contrast to earlier ideas about learning which simply meant that all students would be taught in the same way regardless of whether or not it fell in their zones of proximal development. A further shift that ZPD signalled was a new idea of how students should be evaluated - by examining their methods/ways of solving problems rather than by testing them on what information they already knew/had memorized.
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