{"id":1641,"date":"2022-10-17T21:46:38","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T21:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationaltechnology.net\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2022-10-17T21:46:45","modified_gmt":"2022-10-17T21:46:45","slug":"lev-vygotsky-who-he-was-and-what-he-has-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationaltechnology.net\/lev-vygotsky-who-he-was-and-what-he-has-done\/","title":{"rendered":"Lev Vygotsky: Who He Was and What He Has Done"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who is most known for his theories on developmental psychology. He published on a wide variety of topics. His ideas changed over the years. He pioneered the concept of the zone of proximal development <\/a>(see also Scaffolding<\/a>), as well as the role of culture and language in cognitive development<\/a>. Vygotsky wanted “to create a new and comprehensive approach to human psychological processes” (3<\/sup>, p. 168).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lev Semionovich Vygotsky was born in Orsha, Belarus (at that time, part of the Russian empire) on November 17th, 1896. A brilliant intellectual, developmental psychologist, social activist, and teacher whose work revolved around education, Vygotsky died on June 11th, 1934, aged 38. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Lev was born to the Vygodskii family, a non-religious and affluent family of Jewish ancestry. Simkha Vygodskii, Lev\u2019s father, was a banker and, soon after Lev\u2019s birth, he was designated as department chief of the United Bank in the city of Gomel(2<\/sup>). The entire family moved to Gomel and Lev was schooled at home until 1911. He then entered a private Jewish Gymnasium, graduating with distinction. At a time when the Jewish student quota in the universities in Moscow and Sankt Petersburg barely reached 3%, Lev Semionovich Vygotsky entered the “Jewish Lottery” ballot and, in 1913, he was admitted to the Moscow University. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite his passion for social sciences and humanities, young Lev gave in to family pressure and applied to medical school. However, it only took him one semester to switch to law school. Concomitantly, Lev was also attending lectures at the Shaniavskii University, showing an active interest in the history, culture, tradition, and identity of the Jewish people, linguistics, literature, philosophy, and psychology, and vehemently criticizing Zionism and socialism. In his view, the “Jewish question” could only be resolved by returning to the traditional Jewish Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, Lev would never obtain his university degree. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1917, Lev saw his formal studies disrupted by the October Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd and Moscow and decided to return to Gomel. In 1917, Gomel was under the administrative control of the Ukrainian State and information about Lev\u2019s life during that period is scarce. However, in 1919, the Bolsheviks captured Gomel and, from 1919 to 1923, Lev actively participated in the social transformation of his hometown, becoming a prominent representative of the local Bolshevik government. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1920, he started to sign his journalistic publications as Lev Semi\u00f3novich Vyg\u00f3tskii, replacing his original Jewish surname with Vyg\u00f3tskii and ‘S\u00edmkhovich’ with the Slavic variant, Semi\u00f3novich. His two daughters, born in 1925 and 1930 respectively, as well as his other relatives, never changed their Jewish name. Nowadays, his last name is spelled as ‘Vygotsky<\/em>‘ in English.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Vygotsky, his wife and daughters, date unknown<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In January 1924, Lev attended the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress held in Petrograd (a city that would later be renamed Leningrad). Following the Congress, Vygotsky was offered the possibility to become a research fellow at the prestigious Psychological Institute in Moscow. Vygotsky and his wife, Roza Smekhova, moved to Moscow and Lev started his career as a staff scientist and secondary teacher, focusing on the role of language in learning and learning processes. In 1925, he completed his thesis entitled “The Psychology of Art<\/em>“. However, it was only in 1960 that his dissertation would be published, together with “Pedagogical Psychology”, a book that had at its core the lecture notes he used while working as a psychology instructor in Gomel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The summer of 1925 would mark a turning point in Lev\u2019s life and career. Upon his return from London, where he attended a congress on the education of the deaf, his tuberculosis relapsed and he was hospitalized. Against all odds, he survived. Nonetheless, he remained invalid and unemployed until the end of 1926. In the autumn of 1925, Vygotsky was awarded his doctoral degree in absentia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After being released from the hospital, Lev continued his methodological and theoretical work related to the crisis in the field of psychology. Even though he never finished the manuscript, he kept working on it until 1927. In 1982, the manuscript was finally published. Even though it contained evident editorial misstatements and interventions, it was put forward as one of Vygotsky’s most remarkable works. In his initial manuscript, Vygotsky proposed the development of general psychology that would merge Marxist philosophical approaches with the naturalist and objectivist approaches of psychological science. In the same manuscript, he took a stance against the formation of a “Marxist Psychology” as a valid alternative to philosophical and naturalist schools. In his view, rather than simply applying quotes from Marx\u2019s writings, a real Marxist Psychology should be built upon a methodology pursuant to the Marxian essence.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Vygotsky teaching<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Between 1926 and 1930, Vygotsky brought together various students \u2013 including Alexei Leontiev<\/em>, Boris Varshava<\/em>, Leonid Zankov<\/em>, Alexander Luria<\/em> – and started to explore the development of higher cognitive functions of language comprehension, logical memory, selective attention, and decision-making. This phenomenon was investigated from three different angles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n