[xmca] ZPD

Dear Lois (and Everyone),
  I want to thank you publicly for offering me an understanding of the ZPD that truly changed my entire approach to teaching. When watching the All Stars video, I was so deeply struck at how many lives you have touched. Within the understanding of performance, play, imitation, so many aspects, the ZPD literally became alive for me within the classroom, as a tool for more spontaneity and hopeful transformation. Thank you so much.
   
  I tried a number of years ago to establish what the ZPD meant for me, and that is attached, which was later edited for a book called: Vygotsky's and A. A. Leontiev's Semiotics and Psycholinguistics: Applications for Education, Second Language Acquisition, and Theories of Language (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003, pp.28-53).
   
  However, the statement from you (1996 in Newman and Holzman, Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers) has been my personal anchor for understanding a "living" ZPD: "A ZPD is a form of life in which people collectively and relationally create developmental learning that goes beyond what any individual in the group could learn on her or his own. Our effort is to create continuously overlapping ZPDs, a particular relational activity that simultaneously is and makes possible the transforming of regified behavior (forms of life that have become alienated and fossilized) into new forms of life." (p. 71)
   
  Spending one day in New York with you, really watching the huge number of people you are reaching, with a living ZPD, is something I will never forget.
  Dot
   
   

Dorothy (Dot) Robbins
Professor of German
Russian Orphanage Vyschgorod
www.vygotsky-robbins.com

       
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Received on Thu Feb 7 18:14 PST 2008