Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective on Learning

From my personal investigation into the topic, I have identified three key contributions of Vygotsky in the framing of a socio-cultural perspective on learning. These contributions include his claim for “social sources of development” and his description of “the zone of proximal development” and “semiotic mediation”. These ideas have contributed to explaining where and how learning takes place, who are the main actors and what are the active agents in the learning processes. However, translating these ideas into classroom practice is a challenging task that requires considerable time and effort of different involved parties.

Firstly, development, from Vygotsky’s point of view, is the transformation of social shared activities into internalized processes. Individual development which includes higher mental functioning has its origins in social sources. Mental action is situated in cultural, historical, and institutional settings. The social dimension of consciousness is primary, while the individual dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary. Learning, therefore, takes places first at the social level and then at the individual level. Social interaction, therefore, plays a key role in enabling learning processes to happen; in other words, learning occurs in social interactions.

Secondly, Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which is also connected with his claim about the social origins of higher mental functioning in the individual, explains the way in which social and participatory learning takes place. The zone of proximal development is seen as the distance between the actual and the potential developmental levels within an individual. The later can be reached when the individual is in the interactions or work in collaboration with more mature, more experience or more capable people and peers. Learning, therefore, is to create a ZPD or to awaken numerous and various internal developmental processes that occur only when the individual is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers. Also, since an individual’s learning is expected to occur at his potential level, his conceptual development goes through a journey of departing as “pseudo concept” and arriving as “true concept”. He first imitates more mature, more experienced and more capable people’ mode of understanding and then abstract out his own concept. For Vygotsky, the transformation of “pseudo concepts” to “true concepts” requires the co-participation of the individual and other more mature, more experienced and more capable people in activities. To sum, learning is a co-participatory and co-constructive process.

Thirdly, Vygotsky explained how human mental functioning is tied to cultural, institutional, and historical settings by introducing the term “mediation”. Mediation refers to cultural tools, which include material/technical tools, mental/psychological tools, and conceptual/symbolic tools and are mastered by individuals to form this functioning. These tools might be termed “the carriers of socio-cultural patterns and knowledge”. They are, therefore, the key to all aspects of learning process. It mediates social and individual functioning. It connects the external and the internal or the social and the individual. The process of internalization is, therefore, transformative rather than transmissive, and learning is a mediated process, but not a being-influenced process.

In brief, learning, from socio-cultural perspective, is an interactive, collaborative, co-participatory, co-constructive, and mediated meaning-making process. It takes place at both social and individual levels. The main actors or the active agents in these processes are both human actors and non-human factors, including adults, teachers, children, peers, with different degrees of expertise, and artifacts such as books, CDs, videos, wall displays, computers and so forth. However, there are some challenges facing attempts to translate these ideas from Vygotsky into classroom practice. Considerable planning work need to be done, and substantial changes should be carefully dealt with.

The first challenge is the development of curricula which adopt the socio-cultural perspective. The selection of the right contents and effective instructional methods requires a large amount of effort, expertise, and time. Also, removing the existing curriculum is a difficult task, and convincing different parties of the values of the introduced curriculum is even more challenging. Resistance to changes is nature of human beings, for the desire for safety tend to win the will to take risks. However, as far as the development of effective curricula is concerned, I believe that a number of studies should be conducted first to test the effectiveness of proposed patterns of educational programs, methodologies, instructional methods, instructional strategies, and instructional resources. As long as the results are positive, they can be implemented in larger scales. It should also be noted that the methodology of conducted studies should also be informed by socio-cultural theoretical perspective.

The second challenge is the possibility of teachers’ misinterpretation of the methodological concepts. For example, that learning is a socially interactive process does not mean that students learn from social interactions, but in social interactions. The former focuses on the product, while the later emphasizes the process. If misinterpretation occurs, teachers may, at times, see her role or some of her students’ role in classroom activities as observers, while any of them, teacher and students, at any times, should always play the roles of the participants in all the activities where learning is always embedded. Similarly, collaborative learning may be inadequately taken as the process of role taking between teachers and students, and students and peers in the construction of knowledge. However, from a broader view, students go to class with their complex social relationships and different cultural values, which shape their intellectual interdependence in the construction of knowledge. Collaborative learning, therefore, means “a fluidity of roles and a reliance on various areas of expertise from the students and the teachers in the joint construction of knowledge.” To avoid this potential problem, teachers need to be trained or retrained before they can start applying this approach, and teacher follow-ups, supervision, mentoring and coaching at work are necessary. They should comprehend the theoretical perspective embedded in the curriculum and be able to realize this in every single content piece of the instructional material and in every single activity in the classroom. They should be engaged in the apprenticeship of instructional activities where they can learn how the theory is translated into practice and be convinced in these activities that the methodologies really work. Continuous mentoring and coaching at work should be provided to teachers to ensure the consistence of proper practice and to identify the need for immediate intervention.

The third challenge is only a socio-cultural school environment can enhance the implementation of a socio-cultural curriculum. Every school has its own established climate and culture which may be positive or negative to the success of the school as a learning community. Changing the school climate or culture to build an effective environment for the learning process is challenging in the sense that it requires substantial changes in the concepts, views, attitudes, habits, behaviors, and everyday practice of all school stakeholders. This change cannot happen overnight. Therefore, the very first thing that can be done to bring about this change is to convince school members of the ideas and inspire their positive attitudes. They should be inspired in believing that learning only can take place in interactions and interactions are crucial to how and what students learn. The co-construction of knowledge requires the school to be a family or a learning community in which “each participant makes significant contributions to the emergent understandings of all members, despite having unequal knowledge concerning the topic under study.” Students’ various abilities should be seen as opportunities for the cooperation among themselves for the construction of knowledge and not as the sources for discrimination. Complex social relationships and different cultural values that students gain both in and outside the school setting should be considered to be the contributions to the shaping of the intellectual interdependence in the co-construction of knowledge. Teachers and students see themselves as family members who can learn from each other and support each other by co-participating in all school activities including economic, religious, legal, political, instructional, or recreational activities.

The next challenge is the availability of proper school facilities and instructional resources to facilitate the learning process. As learning is a mediated meaning-making process, suited material tools as mediation play a great part in enabling learning to occur. For example, suited types of desks and chairs may make the classroom activities such as group-work or pair-work effective. Multiple halls can host students and teachers for school events of various interactions. Other facilities such as swimming pools, sport centers or drama stages are crucial for the socialization among school members. However, the challenges we face lie in the affordability for these facilities and the making of right decision in choosing the right resources. A number of schools have identified the facilities they need but found no finance source. Some have spent a lot on luxurious facilities such as computer labs and laboratories, but with on-and-off visits by teachers and students and poorly-designed technologically-integrated lessons. The suggestion is that school should write a proposal that clearly states how the targeted facilities or resources can play the role of effective mediation, how they go in line with the contents, methodologies and instructional methods embedded in the curriculum, how they are going to be used to enhance the learning process and how the teachers and students are going to be trained to use them properly and professionally. For example, there are some computer games aimed at training students’ social skills. Teachers should know this aim to use it for the right purpose and with the right instruction, techniques, attitudes, observations and evaluations.

Furthermore, supportive school leadership and governance are crucial in maximizing the success of a sociocultural learning community. Much research has shown positive correlation between school leadership and governance and teachers’ performance. Whether or not teachers can converse their classrooms into a learning community depends on the support and capability of school leadership and governance. Teachers bring into classrooms with their world view, attitudes, moods, habits and practice that are partly shaped by their working environment in which their interactions with school leaders, administrators, supervisors, and colleagues play a crucial part. All these factors will influence how they behave in classroom and then affect students’ learning process. Thus school leaders and administrators need to be trained to have the suited leading and managing skills and qualities. For example, from socio-cultural perspective, the principal must play different roles as the instructional leader, the emotional leader, a community leader and the facilitator of culture to supervise and evaluate instruction to make sure that students are given optimal learning opportunities, to ensure that teachers are intellectually equipped, emotionally stimulated, and encouraged to assume decision-making positions of leadership in schools to increase student achievement, to inspire and provide incentives for student-centered communal learning, to realize the limitations of leadership on student achievement, and to begin to shape and reshape school culture.

The most challenging factor is whether or not national education policies really support the translation of the socio-cultural learning theory into practice. It is said that the longest distance on earth is from the office of education minister to the classroom. The implication behind this statement is that educational policies are sometimes made without relevance to other aspects of education system. The lack of cohesiveness in the system causes the inefficiency of the implementation of a new idea. For example, from socio-cultural perspective, learning is to create a zone of proximal development or to awaken potential internal developmental processes. Thus, in order for teachers to design instruction and participate in the learning process that can create this zone, teachers not only need rich and various sources of instructional resources that junction as suited mediation to different students but also need time and effort to attend to them both collectively and individually to identify their unique zones. However, the existing class size of most Asian schools is too big for teachers to complete this task. Therefore, ideas are big but the translation is narrow. The suggestion is that education policy makers should not only be academic, professional, creative, but practical and cohesive as well.

From my personal experience as a teacher, I wish to share the following advice for teachers to build a socio-cultural classroom context. First, teachers need to learn that different class have different cultural expectations for teacher-student talk, so multiple discussions as negotiations are needed to establish the class rules. Second, it is important for teachers to know what the students expect their role to be. Negotiating the roles and responsibilities of the students and the teacher in the co-construction of knowledge is crucial because mutual understanding will lead to their active and effective participation in classroom interactions. However, it should be noted that students’ discourse which may reflect their community or family discourse and may not reflect their intellectual ability. Teachers should not be one-minded to have wrong perceptions on students’ academic abilities. This may cause teachers to limit their students’ learning opportunities and inaccurately evaluate students’ contributions to class discussion. Third, students and parents should be invited to share their unique knowledge and ways of knowing with the class. This can be done through school events such as Parents-Children’s Day, Occupation Day, and Father-Child Reading Day and so on. Fourth, if students are bilingual and are reluctant to share their own understanding of the text in the targeted language, teachers should encourage them to use mother tongue to do so. Considerable studies have shown that many bilingual children can demonstrate higher levels of comprehension when encouraged to think about and discuss the text in their native language. Fifth, teachers should play a part in building up the students’ classroom social web and become an active agent of this network. Teachers can also inspire students in peer bonding by having them choose their partners in pair activities. Teachers should not forget to value and praised the unique skills or practice that culturally diverse students might introduce into a classroom task and that make them popular and desirable partners. Sixth, teachers should develop an environment where students feel safe to make errors, for human beings are incomplete and “errors” are valued as an opportunity for students to learn and as a step in “risk-taking” and learning. Last but not least, all students need a classroom environment where they are treated to be active participants or valuable members. Students need to feel safe to speak their voice, using their home language and experiences in the classroom to discuss and critique the world. They need to have a feeling of belonging to a learning family where all of their intellectual, psychological, physical and emotional developmental aspects are attended to and taken well care of.