The Zone of Proximal Development as a Symbolic Space

Key Words
Zone of Proximal Development, ZPD, Learning, Classroom Interactions, Child Development, Communication, Language, Nursery School

Abstract
In this article we examine teaching and learning through the Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). We view the ZPD as a symbolic space for the emergence of diverse forms of communication to bring about sign mediation. Using this notion we present detailed analyses of three episodes video-taped in a nursery classroom, and interpret the teachers' and children's discourse and behaviours as contributions that realize two forms of communication - content-orientated language (about ecology, science and model-making) and communication-orientated language (e.g. about ways of communicating in school). We argue that both forms are involved in the emergence and maintenance of ZPDs as part of the microculture of the classroom. We conclude by suggesting that the ZPD is an ever-emergent space for interaction and communication where learning leads development.

INTRODUCTION

"I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth
that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars."
Jorge Luis Borges, from "The Garden of Forking Paths"

Vygotsky's revolutionary notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) has been interpreted and re-interpreted throughout the decades since his death in 1934. Newman and Holzman (1993: 29) suggested that many authors have co-opted this notion into the paradigms within which they work (cognitive science, interactionist perspectives etc.). In fact, from a reading of Vygotsky's own writings there is not a great deal that one can find out about the workings of the ZPD. Vygotsky introduced the idea in a lecture given in March 1933 (van de Veer and Valsiner, 1991: 329), although he pointed out that it was not originally his own. He died only fifteen months later and clearly had not been able to fully elaborate his thoughts on the ZPD. It is also the case that Vygotsky's whole method emphasizes the need to relate knowledge and concepts, and indeed consciousness, to time and place, to their historical, cultural and social settings. For both of these reasons we regard it as inevitable and proper that researchers working with the ZPD appropriate it, a process, which of necessity, engages with one's existing theoretical perspectives, and hence demands some work on the notion of the ZPD. This is what we attempt to do in this report, emphasizing the need to develop an empirical analysis of the ZPD and its mechanisms, at least where school knowledge and learning are concerned.

Our view of the ZPD as a symbolic space offers us a fruitful tool, as teachers and as researchers, to analyze and perhaps to design environments for teaching and learning in school. Many authors (e.g., Newman and Holzman, 1993) have criticized the notion of the ZPD as a field, almost a physical space, which the child possesses and which the teacher must find in order to be able to teach successfully. We wish to take the notion of the ZPD further away from being thought of as a physical entity, towards the notion of a sign-mediated, intersubjective space for analyzing how people become actors and communicators within any given activity or social practice. This is our sense of the ZPD as a symbolic space. Our task in this article is to illustrate how the ZPD as a symbolic space can be recognized and described and to show the extra value such a perspective offers to researchers and teachers.

Vygotsky's (and our) hypothesis is that all development of the individual comes about through sign mediation in activity. In all intentional educational activities, including and, in particular schooling, learning leading development is a consequence of sign mediation. The revolutionary function of the ZPD is that it is the space, created in activities, in which the participants teach each other and learn from each other, where the dialectic of thinking and speech is manifested, and where the individual's meanings encounter social meanings (sense) and purposes. This implies that the opportunity and possibility for learning does not exist prior to the event or activity. Whilst the ZPD is clearly not a physical space, seeing the ZPD as a symbolic space enables us to shift our focus away from the subject matter per se towards the emergence of ways of communicating. It is a practical matter in the sense that at the same time as the teacher wants the children to learn specific material, because of her positioning as a teacher, it should also be part of the classroom culture that she orientates them to becoming school students who question, answer, argue, justify, and so on. In relation to peer collaboration, Forman and McPhail suggest that "an analysis of the potential benefits of peer collaboration must include information about changes in children's communication, goals, and social interactions over time as well as changes in their ability to solve a particular problem" (1993: 226). We believe that the same applies to teacher-pupil interactions in teaching and learning and thus we are concerned in our analysis below to look at the orientating actions of the teacher regarding developing the child's communicative possibilities as well as the child's content knowledge.

In the next section we will draw on the few clues that Vygotsky gave concerning the ZPD, in three successive formulations in the last fifteen months of his life. We will give some examples of previous work on the ZPD within this framework and we will indicate where our work is placed. In the subsequent section we will return to define and characterize the ZPD as a symbolic space, in interaction with a case study of nursery children in a Brazilian school.