CONCLUDING REMARKS

Our main goal in this report was to recast the Vygotskian notion of ZPD, both theoretically and empirically, centering the analysis on video-taped episodes taken in a nursery classroom.

As the main assumption, we have suggested that the ZPD would be better conceptualized not as the individual's equipment (either cognitive or communicative), but as a symbolic space involving individuals, their practices and the circumstances of their activity. This view takes the ZPD to be an ever-emergent phenomenon triggered, where it happens, by the participants catching each other's activity. It is often fragile and where it is sustained, a process of sign mediation and interaction emerges in which both content-orientated language (which is also communication-dependent) and communication-orientated language (which is also content-related) are present.

The episodes analyzed in this article provided the empirical background for our thinking about the emergence of symbolic spaces. An essential feature of the interactions in episode 1 was the teacher's ability to listen and revise her own interpretations of the situation. But at the same time, both teacher and child may be held accountable for initiating and sustaining two forms of communication: (1) The content-orientated language about ecology, growth and size terms; and (2) The communication-orientated language towards ever more explicit ways of speaking and gesturing in the classroom setting (as contrasted to family language, for example).

The content-orientated language seemed to exist under the realm of the teacher's instructional goals and was created vis-à-vis the emergent circumstances of activity, which included her own inferences about the child's goals. Perhaps in a less intentional and planned way, the teacher was also instructing the child about relations of size (which at the end of episode 1 got the child's attention). Either way, the teacher appeared to profit from specific circumstances to teach the child about concepts she takes to be within his reach of understanding (as seen by pedagogy). This aspect of the interaction, which we might call opportunistic instruction, is usually taken as the prime component of the zone of proximal development (especially in interpretations that subscribe to the force field metaphor).

Following these interactions, episode 2 showed a second phase of opportunistic instruction as the teacher, again triggered by an abbreviated request made by Pedro ("the other", as he touches one of the trays on the shelf), initiated talk about the beans with all the children. As the teacher socialized relevant information, making it public and available for discussion with the whole group, she was again trying to create the conditions for the emergence of a zone of learning and development as seen by more traditional interpretations of the ZPD.

Opportunist instruction about content specific material, as describe here, is certainly a major component of the emergence of ZPDs. But we have emphasized one other process we observed in the episodes which is far less explicit and intentional: the communication-orientated language. In our analysis of episode 1 we argued that, because the teacher was receptive to the child's attempts to be more explicit himself, teacher and child sustained the shared space in which both were progressively more capable of communicating for less ambiguity. We have described the child's moves in this direction and the teacher's attempts to narrow down the focus of her intended instruction.

We would want to add that the ZPD that emerged in episode 1 was supportive of the child's development as the teacher related past and future in the continuous emergence of the present, for (or with) the child. The scheme below summarizes the relations between past and future, as constructed through the interdependent discursive contributions of teacher and child during the interaction.

Past Present Future
1 Pedro: "The earth."
2 Teacher: "See, uh, it's not earth... we put it on cotton wool, right?"
3 Pedro: "Where is... the earth?"
4 Teacher: "We'll move it to earth, that's right!..."
5 Pedro: "And this?"
6 Teacher: "This is the cotton wool... we put to make it grow."
7 Pedro: "And this?"
8 Teacher: "Ah, this one I think it won't grow because it fell down so many times, didn't it Pedro?"

The scheme presents selected contributions by Pedro and the teacher. The dotted arrow in turn 4 indicates that, although the teacher's utterance in this passage does not explicitly mention a past action, it can only make sense in relation to the teacher's promise (made in the past) of moving the beans (in the future) to the horticulture on earth.

The scheme shows that, at first, the teacher's reactions to Pedro's contributions were related to past events and produced what we have called literal interpretations of the child's talk (turns 2 and 6 in the scheme above). But following each of these interactions, the child further specified his language which then led the teacher to reinterpret the child's discourse through the construction of past/future relations (turns 4 and 8). In this process, both child and teacher maintained the symbolic space that results in learning-leading-development. As Valsiner and van der Veer have suggested: "...[T]he zbr concept [zona blizaishevo razvitiya] was used by Vygotsky to emphasize the process of construction of the future structure of the functions on the basis of the present experience by the child." (1993: 44)

Of course, the teacher's intentions (where recognized by the participants of an instructional activity) are not necessarily sufficient for the emergence of ZPDs. As we saw in episode 3, the teacher seemed unaware of the child's progress and explicitly attempted to model "adequate" behaviour with the clay. The teacher's initiative scratched out Ivan's work on the clay and her teaching about how to use the plastic knife, so it seemed, was not captured by the child. The interactional circumstances at this time were insufficient for the emergence of a symbolic space for learning (for example, what counts as appropriate play behaviour with clay).

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