Lev Vygotsky Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Lev Vygotsky - Term Paper Example Noticeably intelligent and articulate as a young boy, Vygotsky was dubbed the "little professor" (Wertsch, 1985, p.4). The family lived amidst an explosion of politics, philosophy, and art as well as prejudice, hunger, and disease. Growing up during the Russian Revolution, a time of tremendous social, cultural, and economic upheaval caused Vygotsky great personal difficulty at the same time it liberated him to look at philosophical and societal issues with fresh eyes. Tuberculosis struck Vygotsky at age twenty-six. Forewarned of an early death, Vygotsky worked at a feverish pace to produce over 180 studies, articles, and books (Blanck, 1990). Vygotsky was such an impassioned speaker that throngs of scholars, unable to gain entry into the crowded halls in which he spoke, gathered outside the windows in the hope of capturing his lectures. Wherever Vygotsky traveled in Russia, people left poetry and garlands of flowers by the wayside. Such accounts describe a unique mind and sensibility that affected and even cast a spell on thousands (Van der Veer and Valsinger, 1991). ... 1). Vygotsky excelled academically, spoke eight languages, and was able to teach far ranging subjects such as literature, Russian, education, psychology, logic, aesthetics, and art history (Blanck, 1990). With close collaborators, Alexander R Luria and Alexei N. Leontiev, Vygotsky formed a famous "troika" (Kozulin, 1990), or what John-Steiner (1997) calls a "thought community" (p.207) that became a driving intellectual force in Russia. Vygotsky borrowed ideas from different disciplines to form his learning theory. Psychology and education are the fields in which he made his major contributions although he possessed no formal training in either. It may be that Vygotsky's unique vision was predicated on his ability to look at established ideas in a new way. This may also account for the wide appeal of his work. Blanck (1990) believes that ... it was precisely his newness to the field coupled with his strong insights from other fields (philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, historical mate rialism) that illuminated for Vygotsky fresh answers to perplexing questions (pp.38-39). Vygotsky was coincidently born the same year as Piaget, and like Piaget, his learning theory exerted a profound influence, even creating a paradigm shift, on the way in which we view human development and learning. Vygotsky was a deep thinker, capable of integrating complex philosophical ideas into a unique vision of his own. Vygotsky investigated how humans think, learn, and function within the context of society. Vygotsky's broad-ranging inquiry across discipline, methodology, and ideology, conceived so long ago and squarely situated within the social realm, continues to motivate and inspire the