Re: ZPD, resistance and conflit

p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
Fri, 10 Oct 1997 17:10:18 -0500

Chuck Bazerman wrote:

>I have been following the ZPD strain with great interest, seeing the many
>illuminating uses made of this concept, originally framed quite narrowly
>by LSV within the issue of testing individual propensity (possibly
>transient and situational, and not necessarily a stable capacity)
>for learning--with all the social, institutional, power correlates that go
>along with that framing.

And in a related thread David Russell wrote:

>I keep wondering if and how a ZPD is a different (more focused) unit of
>analysis than an activity system (in or more sense the term is used in
>CHAT)? If all activity systems (with their participants) are changing, as
>Engestrom says, how and why might one draw a line between ZPD and Activity
>System? (Culture?)

I too wonder how ZPD relates to a unit of analysis like activity or
functional systems. Could it be that many of our questions about negative
zopeds, the roles of artifacts in forming zopeds, and so on are grounded in
the original formulation of this notion around questions of how to measure
individual performance and how to optimize instructional effect by working
in the child's zone? When I think about its articulation as the difference
in performance between the child acting independently (the level of actual
development) and the child acting with some kind of help, it seems to be
hard to make zoped include on-going development of the more experienced
peer or adult, two-way influences, the role of artifacts (i.e., as already
helpers), questions of the impact of destructive and dysfunctional
interactions, questions of large-scale events (e.g., how would the zoped
deal with events like Woodstock, or the Promise Keepers Rally in Washington
D.C., or an urban riot)?

I guess my sense is that the questions people have raised in this thread
(and the descriptions of individual and social change) are outpacing and
struggling against a concept formed in a much narrower and more strategic
fashion (many educational testers today could be challenged by the
implications of zoped as Vygotsky formulated it and questions of
teachability are still important to teachers).

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign