Introduction  

Oleh:

Miller, Ronald

Jenis: Article from Books - E-Book
Dalam koleksi: Vygotsky in Perspective, page 1-18.
Topik: Vygotsky; Perspective; Collected Works; Secondary Literature
Fulltext: Introduction.pdf (143.51KB)

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In recent years Vygotsky has acquired the status of a grand master. His work represents more than a contribution to a speci?c ?eld of psychology and provides a broad framework or way of thinking about and dealing with psychological issues. It is not uncommon nowadays for Vygotsky to be ranked alongside Freud, Piaget and others as one of the leading innovative voices of twentieth-century psychology and this is probably as a result of the translation into English of his six-volume Collected Works. In reading the Collected Works, we need to remind ourselves constantly that they were written by a young scholar in his twenties and thirties when most academic careers are only beginning to get off the ground. These are not the works of a thinker whose ideas have been incubated and honed over an extended period of time. Although Vygotsky’s texts express a maturity of thought way beyond his years, they also exude a youthful exuberance in the over?owing of ideas that emerge from his works. Any life cut down in its prime represents an un?nished and incomplete story and this too is Vygotsky’s legacy. It may also explain an intriguing and distinctive feature of Vygotsky’s writing that is initially hidden from view. Extracting the main points or gist of a text usually means that one is left with a residue of non-essential or redundant material, but to attempt this exercise with Vygotsky’s texts produces an unexpected outcome. Invariably, the residue that is left over turns out to be indispensable for understanding the gist, leaving the reader with no option other than to return to the beginning and incorporate the residue back into the gist. The recursive acts of reading demanded by Vygotsky’s texts reveal the rich layers of meaning that are concealed beneath a literary style that seems designed to allow the reader to hear the writer thinking and grappling with ideas. To understand and appreciate Vygotsky’s thought it is not enough to know what he says. Equally, if not more, important are the reasons and arguments he provides to support his theoretical ideas. For this reason, Vygotsky’s theory does not lend itself to pithy summaries of the nutshell variety. Despite the catchiness of some of his better known comments such as ‘Instruction is only useful when it moves ahead of development’ 1 1 and constructs such as the zone of proximal development,his theories attempt to do justice to the complexity of their object of understanding in a way that is often lost in the secondary accounts of his cultural-historical theory.

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