Lev Vygotsky

I am studying for comprehensive exams in October. I was reading about Vygotsky today. He believed, as did John Dewey, that learning doesn't take place in a vacuum-- within the learner's head, so to speak-- but within the interaction of the individual with the world around him. Vygotsky is the guy who thought up the "zone of proximal development" to describe the activity that takes place during learning. He thought that learning occurred between "what we know how to do" and where we have to reach. It's the "reach" part he was interested in. It reminds me of when a kid is trying to get an apple off a tree. He sees the apple. He wants the apple. He is motivated to climb the tree but the branches are too high. Along comes his grandfather, who picks the child up off the ground just enough so that the child can get the apple. Of course the metaphor is that as the child matures and learns, he will be able to get the apple himself. Knowing that he needs more height, he is motivated to find for himself a ladder that will allow him to get at that apple himself.
Learning and how we can support it is fascinating.
Here are another couple of parts of this that I didn't understand at first: Vygotsky (and Piaget, for that matter) didn't appear on the scene in the US until the 1960's, even though his works were published in the '20's and he did publish! He was a Soviet citizen. Why did we not hear about them at the time they were published? Because... They published in a language other than English. But here is the cool thing about that: their works became available in the States at a time when the instructional community was ready to hear it. At the time Vygotsky was originally writing, here in the States in thirties folks were interested in standards-based testing and outcomes-based education. Ralph Tyler was the go-to guy, and then WWII started and the need to train lots of (maybe literate, maybe not) people quickly was the driver for training. Vygotsky's ideas were much more influential in the 60's, and continue to be a guide today.