Vygotsky in english: what still needs to be done

The Relation Between Environment and Psychological Development: Unpacking Vygotsky’s Influential Concept of Perezhivanie

In recent decades, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (VST) has become particularly influential in the fields of education and educational psychology. Perezhivanie is an important concept in VST that stipulates a relative influence of environment on a person’s psychological development depending on their age or stage of development. However, perezhivanie has been differentially interpreted and applied in previous literature to suit the purposes of domain-specific research. The lack of a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the concept can undermine research findings and their implications for educational practices. Drawing on a content analysis of Vygotsky’s key texts on perezhivanie, this paper provides a much-needed theoretical discussion that unpacks comprehensively the theoretical content of perezhivanie and the methodological principles guiding its application. The findings revealed that conceptually, perezhivanie can be defined as: (a) a theoretical relation between an individual and their environment, (b) an abstract experience of or attitude towards a life situation and (c) a concrete lived experience of an event within that situation. Four major discernible components of an individual’s perezhivanie include the environmental factor, personal characteristics mobilised, refraction prism and psychological influences. Five key methodological principles were conceived to assist the employment of perezhivanie in educational/psychological research: (1) utilising a perezhivanie as a unit of analysis, (2) analysing perezhivanie at different levels, (3) accounting for the perspective of the individual involved, (4) constructing the refraction prism and (5) determining the major personal characteristics mobilised in the perezhivanie. Implications for educational and research practices are then discussed.

Emotion and its relation to cognition from Vygotsky’s perspective

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (VST) has been increasingly utilised as an effective framework to account for the role of emotions in learning and development. Yet, within VST, emotion has neither been systemically theorised nor investigated. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a theoretical discussion of Vygotsky’s perspective on emotion and its relation to cognition. Employing a content analysis approach, three of Vygotsky’s key texts on emotions were closely read and analysed with emerging themes grouped into a system of interrelated theoretical tenets. The insights gained from this paper benefit scholars who are interested in understanding and researching emotions from a VST perspective as well as provide important implications for educational practices.

A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological

The present article gives an overview of sociocultural approaches to creativity and advances a particular theory of the creative process grounded in the notions of difference, position, perspective, dialogue, and affordance. If sociocultural psychology challenges old dichotomies between mind and body, individual and society, then creativity is ideally placed to demonstrate their interdependence. While sociocultural thinking in creativity research has traditionally emphasized the social or collaborative nature of creative processes, recovering old scholarship and reviewing it in light of current empirical developments shows how socio-materiality can properly inform psychological theory in this area. The article starts with an outline of sociocultural principles before considering their application to creativity. It then formulates four propositions regarding the creative process: (a) differences of perspective increase creative potential; (b) exchanging positions and perspectives, within and between individuals, fosters creative processes; (c) these exchanges result in perspectives that reveal previously unperceived affordances; and (d) oftentimes, it is the affordances of material objects or of unique idea combinations that guide the development of novel perspectives in creative work. Evidence supporting these key hypotheses of the perspective-affordance theory of creativity (PAT) comes from research conducted in a variety of areas within psychology and in related fields. In the end, the methodological and practical implications of considering creativity as a process of recognizing differences, exchanging positions, developing perspectives and discovering affordances will be discussed, as well as the broader implications of building theories that bring together, rather than keep separate, the social, the material, and the psychological.

Discovering the Great Royal Seal: New Reality of Vygotsky’s Legacy

The paper explores contemporary state of arts in the perception of cultural-historical theory (CHT) by the international scholarly community. On one hand, we do have a great number of publications exploring and advancing Vygotsky’s legacy in many ways and directions. On the other hand, paradoxically, there is still no agreement about what CHT is as a theory, and what are its subject-matter, laws, principles and research method. The current state of arts could be expressed by the metaphorical words “Christianity without Christ”. The problem is that the existing exposition of CHT appeared over 30 years back, when only a limited number of Vygotsky’s original texts were available. But the new reality, with Vygotsky’s legacy connected by the publication of a significant number of his unknown previously writings and recent archival findings, allows us to improve the existing exposition of CHT. This article provides an example of how this new reality brings solutions to several problems, such as 1) the title of the theory; 2) its subject-matter and 3) the system of laws of psychological development. The last part of the paper indicates several problems and issues to resolve in discovering CHT as a wholistic theoretical system.

Differing times and differing measures: Dimensions of historical time in Vygotsky’s work

The historicity of psychological phenomena plays a key role in Vygotsky’s developmental theory. However, we rarely realize what historicity means to Vygotsky, and what implications the notions about the nature of historical change bring to his theory. We suggest, based on dialogue with authors from the social sciences, that Vygotsky worked with different notions of the nature of historical changes in each developmental plane (phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and historical-cultural). Our investigation on this topic showed that, for Vygotsky, each timescale studied behaved differently: for instance, teleological in civilizational scale, semi-open in ontogenetic time. Due to the great influence exerted by the author’s work on the fields of developmental and cultural psychology, we understand that this kind of investigation can be useful to clarify and enrich both scholarly knowledge about his works and contemporary claims about the role of historical change on the developmental processes in psychology.

The final chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech: A reader's guide

The seventh and last chapter of Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech (1934) is generally considered as his final word in psychology. It is a long chapter with a complex argumentative structure in which Vygotsky gives his view on the relationship between thinking and speech. Vygotsky's biographers have stated that the chapter was dictated in the final months of Vygotsky's life when his health was rapidly deteriorating. Although the chapter is famous, its structure has never been analyzed in any detail. In the present article we reveal its rhetorical structure and show how Vygotsky drew on many hitherto unrevealed sources to convince the reader of his viewpoint.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as an Emergent System: A Dynamic Systems Theory Perspective

This paper sets out to present a novel construal of one of the notions of Vygotskian cultural-historical theory viz., zone of proximal development (ZPD) drawing upon dynamic systems theory. The principal thesis maintains that ZDP is an emergent and dynamic system which is engendered by a dialectical concatenation of psychogenesic and sociogenesic facets of human development over time. It is reasoned that Vygotskian cultural-historical theory of human development, by invoking dialectical logic, has transcended Cartesian substance dualism and in turn has proffered a monistic and process-anchored ontology for emerging becoming of human consciousness. Likewise, it is contended that dynamic systems theory, having assumed fluent flux of reality with a capital R as its ontological axiom, entails a consilience of cognitive and contextual conceptual schemes to describe, explain, and optimize human development. The paper concludes by drawing some interpretive conclusions in regard to ZPD from dynamic systems theory perspective.

Perezhivanie and the study of role-playing games

We propose the use of the concept of perezhivanie, from Cultural Historical Activity Theory, in the analysis of analog role-playing games. In the first section, we present perezhivanie as phenomena and as a concept in Vygotsky’s theory, then we relate the concept of perezhivanie to the theory of the higher mental functions development, and end up articulating perezhivanie to the concept of performance. In the second section, we identify the phenomena of perezhivanie in Role-playing games and its relation to the phenomena of immersion and bleed, proposing the use of the concepts from the first section to better understand role-playing games.

Critical Reflection on the Reception of Vygotsky’s Theory in the International Academic Communities

This paper is an attempt to analyze various types of the reception of Vygotsky’s theory in the international academic communities. The paper develops a critical analysis of three widespread theoretical frameworks of interpretation of Vygotsky’s theory: cognitivism, culturalism, cultural-historical activity theory. It is argues that fragmented readings of particular ideas of Vygotsky, without enough understanding of the theoretical programme in which these ideas have been included dominates in North-Atlantic research. The paper proposes the reconstruction of the theoretical programme of cultural-historical psychology in the social and scientific context of its formation.

Internalization: How culture becomes mind

Internalization, the process by which culture becomes mind, is a core concept in cultural psychology. However, since the 1990s it has also been the source of debate. Critiques have focused on the underlying metaphor of internal-external as problematic. It has been proposed that appropriation provides a better conceptualization, a term that focuses attention more on behavior and less on psychological processes. The present article reviews the debate and introduces the recent concepts of position exchange and symbolic resources. Position exchange focuses on the societal side of culture, on the way in which social situations shape people’s experiences. Symbolic resources focus on culture in terms of specific elements, such as books, films, and so on, which also shape people’s experiences. The key idea common to both position exchange and symbolic resources is that people move through culture, both physically and psychologically. Moving through culture shapes a series of experiences across the lifecourse, and these experiences “layer up” within individuals, forming a complex sedimentation of culture within individuals. In so far as culture is heterogeneous and fragmented, so the sedimented layers of experience will also be heterogeneous and fragmented, thus creating the tensions that underlie the dynamics of mind.

Contributions of Hebb and Vygotsky to an integrated science of mind

Hebb and Vygotsky are two of the most influential figures of psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. They represent cultural and biological approaches to explaining human development, and thus a number of their ideas remain relevant to current psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In this article, we examine similarities and differences between these two important figures, exploring possibilities for a theoretical synthesis between their two literatures, which have had little contact with each other. To pursue these goals, the following topics are discussed: (a) Hebb and Vygotsky's lives and training; (b) their innovations in theory building relating to an "objective psychology" and objective science of mind; (c) their developmental approach; (d) their treatment of mediation and neuropsychology; and (e) their current relevance and possible integration of their views. We argue that considering the two together improves prospects for a more complete and integrated approach to mind and brain in society.