The early history of the scaffolding metaphor: Bernstein, Luria, Vygotsky, and before

ABSTRACT

Given the growing interest in the scaffolding process, it is worthwhile to address competing accounts about the origin of this term. The concept was empirically introduced by Wood, Bruner, and Ross in 1976 and has often been associated with the “zone of proximal development” in the writing of L.S. Vygotsky. We trace the origins of it in instances of the term being used by Nikolai Bernstein and Alexander Luria, as well as in Vygotsky’s notebooks. Our historical search helps to highlight the theoretical connection between this metaphor and the teaching/learning versus development opposition, and its relation to motor control development.

Acknowledgments

We thank many people who helped us on the way of this historical endeavor by pointing to the possible sources, providing the materials, or helping with their interpretations and memories: Shaaron Ainsworth, Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs, Tatiana Akhutina, Anatoly Chusov, Mike Cole, Jan Derry, Maria Falikman, Thomas Janßen, Anatoly Krichevets, Nadezhda Plungian, Aleksandra Radkovskaya, Gail Ross, Irina Sirotkina, Dragan Trninic, René van der Veer, David Wood, Ekaterina Zavershneva, and the staff of Harvard University Archive, who were very responsive and helpful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Personal communication, May 1, 2018.

2. Personal communication, March 26, 2018.

3. The permission to work and to cite materials from Jerome Bruner’s personal archive was granted by Whitley Bruner.

4. René van der Veer (personal communication, February 4, 2018); Ekaterina Zavershneva (personal communication, November 20, 2017).

5. To sublate is an English translation of German aufheben that has “a twofold meaning …: it equally means ‘to keep,’ ‘to preserve,’ and ‘to cause to cease,’ ‘to put an end to’” (Hegel, 2010, pp. 81–82). Hegel used this word as a core concept in the description of the dialectical method as a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis is overcome in the synthesis.

6. Originally, Marx wrote this in French, and the word was échafaudage; it was translated into Russian as здания (buildings; Marx, 1919) and строительные леса (constructions for building erection; Marx & Engels, 1955).

7. Starting from ideological pressure in 1931 and strongly continued in 1936, the political campaign against Pedology—the general science of children development and learning—led to a ban on Vygotsky’s books, as a main theorist of this science until the middle of the 1950s (Yaroshevskiy, 1991). Bernstein was also not allowed to publish between 1949 and the early 1960s due to his independence from official Soviet science ideas (Sirotkina, 2018) and Jewish origins (Talis, 2015).

8. The Russian text is “его ходьба еще не готова, она еще ‘в лесах’ тех внешних орудий, с помощью которых она создается” (Vygotsky & Luria, 1930/1993a, p. 196).

9. According to Bernstein, each motor action is regulated at a few levels of control: Level A sustains appropriate tone and equilibrium, Level B serves the muscular-articular links and synergies and fulfills kinematic coordination, Level C is responsible for the movement in space, Level D performs actions with objects and artifacts, and Level E is responsible for intellectual and symbolic actions. In each motor act, there is the leading, highest level of regulation that fulfills the required action together with the other background, subsidiary levels that provide necessary corrections. All levels work as an ensemble and compound a functional system. Level C2 is the sublevel of Level C that is responsible for precise movements, such as reaching for something and throwing at the target. This sublevel Bernstein distinguishes as the lowest level, which may control a new motor skill development while it stays under voluntary control.

10. The book was ready for publishing by the summer of 1949 but was stopped due to the repression against Bernstein, who did not acknowledge Pavlov as a prominent Soviet physiologist (Sirotkina, 2018) during an anti-Semitic campaign “against cosmopolitism” (Talis, 2015).

11. It is interesting to note that Bernstein’s hobby was the construction of bridges. His brother became an engineer of bridges (Levin, 2005), and he himself had published a few popular articles on bridge construction (e.g., Bernstein, 1965). The bridge’s scaffolding is a rare case of scaffolds that support an erected construction as they help to reach the next column and to support the span of a bridge until it will be locked and can stand on its own (see Figure 1c).

12. http://luria.ucsd.edu/AudioVideo/DVD_Luria4.mp4 transcribed here: http://www.psyanima.su/journal/2013/1/2013n1a3/2013n1a3.1.pdf.

13. The permission to work and to cite materials from Alexander Luria’s family archive was granted by Elena Radkovskaya

14. See Bruner (1973) for a review and the studies with Subbotsky on voluntary control by speech (Luria, 1979).

15. We use “teaching/learning” as a specific translation for Russian obuchenie, aiming to stress the interactive process between a teacher and a student as it was essential for Vygotsky. This contrasts with an interpretation of obuchenie as instruction (Cole, 2009).

16. The published version of the paper (Wood et al., 1976) refers to this discussion as well, but in a less explicit way: “We assume, however, that the process can potentially achieve much more for the learner than an assisted completion of the task. It may result, eventually, in development of task competence by the learner at a pace that would far outstrip his unassisted efforts” (p. 90).

17. Sometimes it can also be referred as “forward model” (e.g., Rahaman, Agrawal, Srivastava, & Chandrasekharan, 2018). From a phenomenological theoretical perspective (Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Zagorianakos & Shvarts, 2015), this embodied form of future anticipation would be conceptualized as operative intentionality.

18. According to Bernstein, a real exercise is happening with iterative transformations of the movements as it is getting better and better coordinated within the environment, thus despite the repetitive actions, there is no exact repetition.