Published in: Remedial and Special Education, (1999). Vol.20, No. 6, pp. 32-64.
INTRODUCTION. The last two decades of this century in the USA have been marked by an upsurge of interest in Lev S. Vygotsky's ideas. Several volumes of new translations of Vygotsky's writings appeared recently, the most prominent among them are "The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky" (Vygotsky, 1987-1998) and "The Vygotsky Reader" (Valsiner & Vanderveer, Eds., 1994). Since the late 1980s, literally dozens of books, articles and book chapters have been published by professionals in different fields interpreting, elaborating and expanding Vygotsky's scientific legacy. Lately, numerous websites and electronic discussion forums on the Internet have emerged to discuss ideas written by a fountain pen. Within the last two decades an "invisible college" of enthusiastic and inspired Vygotskians has formed in this country. Vygotsky has emerged as one of the major psychologists in the 20th century (Wertch, 1885, 1998), the "icon" of the "cognitive revolution" (Haywood & Tzuriel, 1992), post-modern educational progressivism (Newman & Holzman, 1993), and cultural pluralism (Rogoff, 1990). He is rightfully considered to be the founder of "cultural psychology": a psychological theory in which the human being is the subject of cultural, rather than natural processes (Ratner, 1991).
What is it in Vygotsky's works that invite scientists from different fields to scrutinize his writings as if he were our contemporary? Indeed, many factors created the stage for Vygotsky's selection as a promising alternative to existing psychoeducational theories and practices. According to some observers (Brunner, 1987) what has brought Vygotsky into the limelight was, in fact, a powerful pendulum swing from biologically-based understanding of human behavior to the social/cultural explanation of human activity. The timeliness of Vygotsky's works is borne out by the fact that he discovered the connecting links between sociocultural processes taking place in society, and mental processes taking place in the individual. Vygotsky, as no other psychologists in this century, succeeded in developing an approach that connects social and mental processes and describes the essential mechanisms of the socialization and development of the human being. In education, Vygotsky's theory is viewed as a counterbalance to behaviorism, and what is more important, as an alternative to the influential concepts of Piaget. For years, the predominant theoretical framework for child care and education in this country had been Piaget's theory. In this theory, a maturational process determines cognitive competence and a child's ability to learn: learning follows maturation. Contrary to this, Vygotsky considered learning as a shared/joint process in a responsive social context. In the Vygotskian framework, children are capable of far more competent performance when they have proper assistance ("scaffolded learning") from adults. The optimism of Vygotsky's general message, substantiated by a number of concrete methodologies (such as "dynamic assessment", "mediated learning", "cognitive education" among many others) developed within Vygotsky's theory, found an enthusiastic audience in American education of the 90s. Vygotsky has become a powerful "identification figure" in education (Mall 1990, Gredler 1992, Kozulin 1998), developmental psychology (Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992, Valsiner & Vanderveer, 1991), school psychology (Gindis, 1995, 1996), educational psychology (Karpov & Bransford, 1995, Das, 1995) and, recently, in early childhood education (Berk & Winsler, 1995, Bodrova & Leong, 1996)....
UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL/CULTURAL ASPECT OF THE DISABILITY....
Within the context of his paradigm of the social nature of the disability, Vygotsky introduced the core concepts of the "primary disability, "secondary disability" and their interactions. A "primary" disability is an organic impairment due to biological factors. A "secondary" disability refers to distortions of higher psychological functions due to social factors. An organic impairment prevents a child from mastering some or most social skills and acquiring knowledge at a proper rate and in an acceptable form. It is the child's social milieu, however, that modifies his/her course of development and leads to distortions and delays. From this point of view, many symptoms such as behavioral infantilism or primitivism of emotional reactions in individuals with mental retardation are considered to be secondary handicapping condition, acquired in the process of social interaction. Vygotsky pointed out that from the psychoeducational perspectives the primary problem of a disability is not the organic impairment itself but its social implications: an organic defect is recognized by society as a social abnormality in behavior. Expectations and attitudes of social milieu and conditions created by the society influence the access of a child with disability to socio-cultural knowledge, experiences, and opportunity to acquire the "psychological tools". Changing negative societal attitudes towards the individuals with disabilities should be one of the goals of special educators (Vygotsky, 1995). The search for positive capacities and qualitative characteristics in the upbringing (nurturing) of children with disabilities is the "trademark" of Vygotsky's approach. He called for the identification of a disability in a child from the point of strength, not weakness - he labeled this "positive differentiation". With his slashing sarcasm he nicknamed the traditional approach to the individuals with disability an "arithmetical concept of handicap" because of its view of a child with disability as the sum of his/her negative characteristics. He suggested, for example, the identification of levels of overall independence and needs for support rather than levels of feeblemindedness in children with mental retardation (see: "Methods of Study a Child with Mental Retardation", Vygotsky, 1995, p. 114). Sixty years later this approach was employed by the American Association on Mental Retardation in their newest manual (AAMD, 1992)....
QUALITATIVE VERSUS QUANTITATIVE DIFFERENCES IN UNDERSTANDING OF DISABILITY. Traditionally, a child with a disability has been considered to be either "underdeveloped/developmentally delayed" (in the case of mental retardation) or "a regular child lacking a sensory organ" (in the case of physical and/or sensory impairments). In other words, the difference between a child with a disability and his/her non-disabled peer is only quantitative. According to Vygotsky, the development of the individuals with a disability is not "slowed-down" or "missing" variations of normal development. For example, he objected to the terms "developmental disability" or "developmental delays" in relation to mental retardation. He called our attention to the qualitative uniqueness of a disabled child's development mediated by a such powerful factor as the social implication of disability. He wrote: "A child whose development is impeded by a disability is not simply a child less developed than his peers; rather, he has developed differently." (Vygotsky, 1983, p. 96). The development of a child with a disability has major qualitative differences in the "means and ways" of his/her internalization of culture. The core of the development of a child with a disability is the "divergence" between his/her "natural" and "social" paths of development. Vygotsky pointed to two major differences in the development of a child with a disability in comparison with his typically developing peers: the formation of compensatory strategies (mechanisms) and the emergence of social complications of the disability. Without an understanding of these qualitative differences, no effective remediation is possible. Vygotsky suggested that in the future science will be able to create the disability-specific "profile" of this discrepancy as the most important characteristic in the psychological development of the child with a particular disability. He listed the dynamic and forms of socialization, adoption of "psychological tools", and formation/use of compensatory strategies as the "milestones" of this profile (Vygotsky, 1993, see: "Defect and Compensation" and "Principles of Social Education for the Deaf-Mute Child"). Compensatory strategies are by no means "mechanical substitutions" of impaired functions: they are the product of the child's personality, his/her experiences, and education. Compensatory strategies are aimed at mastering of "psychological tools" and to use them to acquire cultural forms of behavior. When the direct way of developing psychological functions is blocked (e.g. in the case of blindness) the compensatory strategies offer an "indirect" path to the same goal of cultural development. Creating the "disability-specific" compensatory strategies was Vygotsky's vision of the future in remedial education. In Russia, based on Vygotsky's theoretical foundation, an effective system of educating and upbringing deaf individuals was created (Knox & Kozulin, 1989, Lebedinsky, 1985, Zaittseva et al. 1999).
Vygotsky's understanding of the disability as a social/cultural, developmental, and qualitatively-specific phenomenon has brought about two distinctive methodologies that may have a long-lasting impact on the field of special education: "zone of proximal development" and "dynamic assessment'.
[The full article is available at <http://www.bgcenter.com/Vygotsky_Vision.htm>.] -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>