[xmca] ZPD in a new light

[Ana Marjanovic-Shane <ana@zmajcenter.org>]

Dear all,

I would like to share some of my thoughts regarding Ferholt and Lecusay's paper: "Adult and Child Development in the Zone of Proximal Development: Socratic Dialogue in a Playworld". 

	Ferholt’s and Lecusay’s paper introduces a new way of looking at Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZO-PED), possibly transforming that concept into something rather new and different from the original one. It does it in three ways: It introduces a possibility that developmental transformations in social interactions between adults and children can happen not only to children, but to adults, too. Second, they focus not only on the cognitive changes, i.e. changes in understanding of certain concepts, logical arguments and/or situations, rather they introduce the analysis of the quality of the relationships in terms of caring and power distribution between the participants: from authoritative and asymmetrical to democratic and symmetrical power relations between adults and children. And finally they look at the extremely powerful transformations in the emotional ZPD that can lead to aesthetic and cathartic transformations of all the participants in the relationships to each other and to the event in which they all grappled with very hard interpersonal, logical and epistemological issues and were able to jointly build a novel, unexpected and gratifying solution.

	Their paper truly poses new questions about the very concept of ZPD and the nature of development that takes place in the interaction between children and adults and between children and the wider culture. It also, through the vividness of the event they describe, breathes life back into our, sometimes too abstract and too decontextualized manipulations of units of analysis with which we build our conceptual systems.

	Let me start with their idea that development happens to all the participants in the ZPD, including children and adults. It is very interesting to note the way Vygotsky described ZPD in in two very different ways in his two articles: “Interaction between Learning and Development” and “The Role of Play in Development” — both published next to each other in the Mind and Society”
	In the “Leaning and Development” he develops the idea that ZPD is the “distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving [Ana: past learning and finished development] and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” [Ana: current learning and the “potential”, i.e. future development] (Vygotsky, Mind in Society, 1978, page 86). And on page 88, he states: “human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.” 
	In “The Role of Play in Development” Vygotsky defines ZPD as follows. I will give a little wider quote to situate it in his full context: 
	“Looking at the matter from the opposite perspective [to the theories that consider play as the pure search for pleasure, that Vyg. critiques], could one suppose that a child’s behavior is always guided by meaning, that a preschooler’s behavior is so arid that he never behaves spontaneously simply because he thinks he should behave otherwise? This strict subordination to rules is quite impossible in life, but in play it does become possible: thus play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development.
	Though the play-development relationship can be compared to the instruction-development relationship, play provides a much wider background for changes in needs and consciousness. Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives — all appear in play in the highest level of preschool development. The child moves forward essentially through play activity” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 102-103).
	
	In both instances, Vygotsky’s perspective focuses on an individual child’s relationship to abstract concepts (instructional settings) and to abstract rules of behavior in different imaginary (or future life) situations (play settings). What the child learns is given by the “adults” or “more capable peers”, and it pre-exists in the form of rules, values, and roles in the culture into which the child is growing. 

	However, although in both activities (instruction and play), the child is interacting with others, Vygotsky does not focus on the nature of that interaction and the quality of the relationships in that interaction. The ZPD described like that, stays on the level of a drawing board, a plan for future research, and poses a big question rather than it answering it.

	What Ferholt and Lecusay are doing in their study is to start to conceptualize some answers to the questions that Vygotsky posed in his descriptions of the ZPD. They took the notion from the realm of the abstract and admittedly rather sketchy concept and situated it in the real life moment to start looking at and understanding the very dynamic of the live interpersonal social relationships that happen both in guidance (instruction) and in play, and that are the setting of the learning and development. The main aspect of this relationship that they discuss is the relationship of power that contains both the ontological and the epistemological components: a) how the teacher-children relationship grows from a dominant (Magisterial dialogue) to a democratic one (Socratic Dialogue); and b) how this change in the interpersonal relationship, the willingness, so to speak, of the teacher to LISTEN to to voices of the children and give them equal power — leads to the creation of a new vision - both for the children and for the teacher! 
	The ontological aspect of this situation shows that the transformations happening in the ZPD are transformations in the quality of the teacher-children relationship! And that means that ZPD has a potential to change the adults as well as the children. Therefore, on one hand, the children seem to be experiencing development at least as a progressive growth in their conceptualizations, language they use, ability to take into account multiple points of view and multiple feelings arising between themselves. On the other hand, the teacher was experiencing the development not only of his teaching and guiding strategies, but also of his understanding and accepting of the children as FULL human beings and not just "humans-in-preparation”. This lead to his pedagogical orientations to be transformed from authoritative, teacher run philosophy to a more collaborative understanding of education, i.e. to the community of learners orientation.
	In that sense, Ferholt and Lecusay’s work is a step away from Vygotsky’s progressivist philosophy in which development is seen as having only one trajectory — a progress from less mature to more mature forms of behavior and thinking. (See Bakhurst, “Vygotsky’s demons”, 2007 in The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky).

	Their study also poses many new questions. For instance, what is the quality of the ZPD, and can it exist at all, if there is no transformation of the interpersonal relationships and no transformations of the teachers? What is learned and in what ways can it lead to transformational development in more traditional settings in which the only authority belongs to the teacher? 

The quality of the relationships in terms of the emotional transformations of all the participants and the sense of aesthetic catharsis are not less important issues, but I want to leave them for another posting.

Ana


__________________________
Dr. Ana Marjanovic-Shane
Assistant Professor of Education
Chestnut Hill College
e-mails:  Marjanovic-ShaneA@chc.edu
                 ana@zmajcenter.org
Phone:    267-334-2905
Chestnut Hill College…celebrating 85 years of tradition and risk





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