[xmca] Zoped As Chronotope

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

The other day I had dinner with Professor Yuji Moro and Professor Dongseop Park, both of whom have published work on the unpredictability of the ZPD in Mind, Culture, and Activity. There was a young graduate student in geography who is doing a thesis on Vygotsky, Bakhtin and something she calls "metro-glossia" (a rather good term for the centripetal tendencies of language when you think about it). She gave an extremely interesting summary of her work. But about halfway through it, I realized that she had a GEOGRAPHER'S concept of the zone of proximal development.
 
What I mean by that is that she interprets the word "zone" literally, as SPACE. The zone of proximal development is the space between the adult performer and the child performer. We reduce its distance by putting the tykes in pairs with more able peers, and we increase its distance by putting them in T-S interactions with full-sized adults. 
 
It's quite easy to see how THIS interpretation of the zone, as SPACE, will lead in short order to the first of Chaiklin's non-Vygotskyan assumptions about the zone, which I always think of as the "GAP" assumptions. G is for the "Generality" assumption (viz. "There is a ZPD for EVERYTHING"). If the zone is simply the space between the less able performer and the more able one, or (more metaphorically) between the less able performance and the more able performance, then there really is a ZPD for everything, and there is no difference between a zone of proximal development and a zone of proximal learning.
 
What is not so obvious is the effect that interpreting the zone as SPACE has on the next term of the zoped, namely "proximal". If we interpret the zone as space, then the word "proximal" means "nearby", and not, as in Francoise Seve's excellent translation ("la zone prochaine de developpment") "next". "Next" implies TIME just as "nearby" implies space. If we interpret the word "proximial" as "nearby", this brings us in fairly short order to the next of our "GAP" assumptions, namely the "Assistance" assumption (viz. "The ZPD is what happens when the child receives assistance from someone nearby"). But as Chaiklin points out, this means we lose the WHOLE of the precise chronology of development that Vygotsky was working out in Thinking and Speech and charting up for his unfinished work "Child Development" (Volume Five of the Cllected Works"). Once again, no difference between a zone of proximal development and a zone of proximal learning.
 
Once again, I think that interpreting "proximal" as referring to SPACE has a big effect on the next term, namely "development", which then loses its ontogenetic content and simply becomes a banal (almost behaviorist) statement about microgenesis. (I have often thought that we should restrict the use of the term microgenesis to ONLY those "aha" moments which can be reliably linked to development and exclude "microgenetic" moments of mere learning, but I recognize that this is a minority opinion.) Once again, the interpretation of "development" as mere learning leads in short order to the third of Chaiklin's "GAP" assumptions, namely "Potential" (viz. "The ZPD is a potential waiting inside the child like an embryo surrounded by endosperm"). Whatever the child grows into is then the product of the ZPD.  Once again, no difference between ZPD and ZPL.
 
But what is the alternative? It seems to me that the alternative is to interpret the ZPD as a "chronotope", that is, a time-space continuum which is produced by a particular speech genre, or rather the meta-speech genre which corresponds, after the age of two, to the child's speech development. 
 
On the one hand, it is a space, because it corresponds, at first quite literally, to the child's "radius of subjectivity". When the child is limited to ostension and simple indication, that radius is quite literally an arm's length. 
 
But more importantly, it is a movement of that space through time, because the child's "radius of subjectivity" expands, first through indication, and then through signification, and finally through the expansion into complexes, and the explosion into concepts. It is, as we might have expected all the long, the HISTORICAL, time dimension of the zoped which transforms a mere zone of proximal learning into the zone of next development.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 



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