The Zone of Proximal Development

Vygotsky gives extensive treatment to the zona blizaishevo razvitiya twice in his

published work: in an essay published in Mental Development of Children and the

Process of Learning published posthumously in 1935 and translated as “Interaction

between Learning and Development” in Mind in Society in 1978; and in Chapter 6, Part

4.4 of Thinking and Speech (1987) as part of his discussion of scientific concepts. The

ZPD has become, in all likelihood, Vygotsky’s most widely referenced notion, serving as

what DiPardo has described as a gratuitous “drive-by reference” for many who quote him

(A. DiPardo, personal communication, October 23, 1995). The ZPD has seemed at times

like all things to all people; Cazden (1996), in surveying modern citations to Vygotsky,

has argued that most readings of his ideas are selective, that is, taken to fortify an

author’s perspective rather than to delineate Vygotsky’s theories based on a careful and

extensive reading of his work.

Vygotsky (1987) describes the ZPD as the difference “between the child’s actual

level of development and the level of performance that he achieves in collaboration with

the adult” (p. 209) during a pedagogical process. Vygotsky’s outline of the ZPD occurs

solely within the context of a teaching-learning relationship between a pair of people, one

more and one less knowledgeable. During this process “a central feature for the

psychological study of instruction is the analysis of the child’s potential to raise himself

to a higher intellectual level of development through collaboration to move from what he

has to what he does not have through imitation” (p. 210).

Vygotsky defines imitation as a process in which “there must be some possibility

of moving from what I can do to what I cannot”; he explicitly distances himself from

imitation as “mechanical activity” (p. 209) which better characterizes the training of

animals. Imitation, in contrast to the mimetic habituation involved in training, is part of

what Vygotsky calls “instruction” in which one learns something “fundamentally new”

(p. 210). Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991), relying on papers written by Vygotsky

around the time he was working on Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky, 1933/1966,

1933/1984, 1935 [which includes “Interaction between Learning and Development” in

Vygotsky, 1987]), describe this distinction as being “between insightful learning and

trial-and-error learning. . . . children are capable of intellectual, insightful imitation. . . .

teaching can evoke and promote their cognitive development” (pp. 344-345).

The zone described by Vygotsky (1987) is a set of parameters that defines what is

accessible to the learner. Instruction should fall neither below the lower threshold nor

above the upper threshold of the learner’s parameters: “Productive instruction can occur

only within the limits of these two thresholds” (p. 211). Between these boundaries is a

“sensitive period” or “optimal [period] for instruction” (p. 212). Here “The teacher must

orient his work not on yesterday’s development in the child but on tomorrow’s” (p. 211;

emphasis in original); that is, on the buds that produce the fruits of learning. Instruction

should therefore be pitched to the upper threshold so that it leads development toward

culturally valued knowledge and concepts.

This capacity for insightful imitation is illustrated by the role of play or

experimentation as a way of helping to create a zone of proximal development, i.e., to

push its upper threshold through “the active imitation of a model through play” (p. 345).

Both instruction and play, then, can push and extend one’s threshold for learning toward

something fundamentally new, revealing the dynamic, flexible, and progressive nature of

the ZPD. The idea of learning something new is central to Vygotsky’s genetic (i.e.,

developmental) method. Vygotsky thus characterizes the ZPD as an individual learner’s

bounded “zone of . . . intellectual potential” (p. 209). The goal of a teacher, adult, or more

capable peer should be to help learners do more—although not infinitely more—and

solve more difficult tasks than they can independently.

Vygotsky’s (1978, 1987) own postulation of the ZPD is actually quite limited

compared to the more scopious interpretations developed by his theoretical progeny.

How, then, to make the theoretical leap from Vygotsky’s dyadic pedagogical outline of

the ZPD to such formulations as Moll’s (1990) idea that the ZPD connects the learner

with broader social contexts that mediate intellectual potential toward cultural

frameworks for thinking? Vygotsky (1987) hints at this broader perspective by

acknowledging that “our research demonstrates that these sensitive periods are associated

with the social processes involved in the development of the higher mental functions” (p.

213). Yet this hint does little to account for what appears to be a major shift by Moll and

others. Moll, rather than seeing the ZPD as a learner’s zone of intellectual potential,

views it as “social contexts . . . for mastery of and conscious awareness in the use of . . .

cultural tools” (p. 12).

We use Zinchenko’s (1995) distinction between Vygotsky (1978, 1987) and

Leont’ev’s (1981) activity theory to identify the theoretical bridge needed to adopt the

broader postulation of the ZPD proposed by Moll (1990). While grounded in Vygotskian

principles, activity theory emphasizes volitional, goal-directed, tool-mediated action in

the development of consciousness and higher mental functions (Wertsch, 1981).

Zinchenko describes Leont’ev’s departure from Vygotsky as follows: “[Vygotsky’s]

Cultural-historical psychology was concerned with the problem of ideal mediators that

exist between humans and between humans and the world. . . . The psychological theory

of activity was concerned with the problem of real (i.e., concrete) tools and objects that

humans . . . place between themselves and nature” (p. 44). The ideal mediators

described by Zinchenko were words and their meaning, which Vygotsky regarded as the

unit of analysis for understanding the development of human consciousness. Activity

theory as outlined by Leont’ev was more concerned with human action in the world as

mediated by various tools, including psychological tools such as speech but also

including more tangible mediational means such as a pencil or loom. From a semiotic

standpoint, in the development of consciousness, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical

psychology foregrounds the sign, particularly the word which represents the conceptual

or the ideal. Leont’ev’s activity theory foregrounds tool-mediated action and thus

focuses on the material rather than the ideal. Neither sees the two as separate but rather

emphasizes one to account for the other.

Leont’ev’s (1981) emphasis on tool-mediated action shifted the unit of analysis to

action rather than the signs produced by action. “Consciousness,” he argued, “was not

freed from the short rein of activity. Rather than giving rise to activity, consciousness

was a secondary, though not second-rate, reflection of it” (p. 44). Leont’ev’s concern

was thus with the ways in which social action produces changes in consciousness. This

emphasis in turn requires attention to the cultural and historical ways in which social

action has become patterned, habitual, and proleptic (i.e., assumed as natural; Cole, 1996)

and to the particular tools—and ways of using tools—sanctioned in different settings.

Attending to the role of cultural tools and practices suggests that activity is

intimately tied to the cultural settings in which social action occurs. Wertsch (1985)

argues that the term “activity” refers to

a social institutionally defined setting [in which] the implicit assumptions .

. . determine the selection of actions and their operational composition.

The guiding and integrating force of these assumptions is what Leont’ev

called the motive of an activity. For Leont’ev a motive is not a construct

that can be understood in biological or even psychological terms. Rather,

it is an aspect of a sociohistorically specific, institutionally defined setting.

Among other things, the motive that is involved in a particular activity

setting specifies what is to be maximized in that setting. By maximizing

one goal, one set of behaviors, and the like over others, the motive also

determines what will be given up if need be in order to accomplish

something else. (p. 212)

The principles of activity theory have enabled current interpreters

of Vygotsky to view the ZPD more in terms of settings than individual

learners’ zones of potential. Leont’ev (1981) has provided the grounds for

viewing the ZPD as distributed throughout a setting rather than merely

circumscribing an individual’s intellectual potential (cf. Salomon, 1993).

Moll (1990; cf. Engeström, 1987) describes the social system that

constitutes the ZPD: “[W]e should think of the zone as a characteristic not

solely of the child or of the teaching but of the child engaged in

collaborative activity within specific social environments. The focus is on

the social system within which we hope children learn, with the

understanding that this social system is mutually and actively created by

teachers and students” (p. 11; emphasis in original).

For Moll and Newman et al. (cf. Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Author 2, 1995)

the ZPD is a tool-mediated setting in which activity is directed toward cultural

goals. The focus for these theorists is on the social systems in which human

development takes place, making the cultural-historical setting of learning itself

the zone of proximal development. Activity theory thus enables an explanation of

learning without the mediation of explicit instruction; learning can be explained

through the learner’s engagement with other cultural mediators.

We use activity theory’s more distributed notion of the ZPD in this study, in

which we focus on Leigh’s appropriation of the pedagogical tool of the five-paragraph

theme for teaching her eighth-grade students how to write. She does so within several

ZPDs: the teacher education program from which she earned her credentials, her middle

school and its various idiocultures (her departmental colleagues, her middle school team,

and her state-supported entry-year support committee), and the policy context that

mandated a state writing test predicated on students’ production of five-paragraph

themes. She entered these social contexts with a unique interpsychological system

formed through her prior experiences with school and an ethic of care that affected her

disposition to gravitate toward the five-paragraph theme as a principle instructional tool.

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