Concepts, collaboration, and a company of actors: a Vygotskian model for concept development in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

Based on historical sources and publication records in the early 20^th century, we suggest that Vygotsky’s recognition of the ‘paradox’ in human learning and his conceptualisation of advanced thinking were largely influenced by Stanislavski’s work in theatre. In this paper, we offer some evidence for this argument on Vygotsky’s nascent system of concept development, which ultimately expanded the notion and process of education in modern society. We then provide our informed speculation on the ways in which Vygotsky might have constructed the zone of proximal development model as an integral part of concept development. We conclude our discussion with practical illustrations of creating ZPD in 21^st century classroom contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Vygotsky
• zone of proximal development
• conceptual development
• perezhivanie
• collaborative social reasoning

An unexplored yet potentially critical aspect of L.S. Vygotsky’s later ideas on conceptual development is what we refer to in this paper as, ‘the paradox of the learner’.¹ Authentic actions are often driven by emotions, but successful actions (especially in complicated and diverse problem-setting ecologies) are organised from a distance, using sagacity with a minimum of personal emotions. These two competing and in some ways antithetical conceptual systems must be brought together to expand and extend humans’ abilities to navigate increasingly complex physical and social ecologies. Spontaneous concepts are often embedded in emotions of the moment and provide energy and motivation for bringing tasks to some type of fruition, the type of energy Vygotsky at one point refers to as ‘the wind that puts the clouds in motion’ (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 282). Non-spontaneous concepts, developed (and instructed) by social groups as dispassionate organising principles for crucial activities (what in modern parlance might be termed ‘algorithms’), are designed to avoid the types of volatility emotional responses can bring to activities, while offering consistency and cohesion across time and space. On the one hand, spontaneous concepts are slaves to emotions of the moment. On the other hand, non-spontaneous concepts lacking any affect may suppress any ‘wind’ that pushes individuals’ thinking forward.

Vygotsky recognises this fundamental problem in understanding and promoting higher level thinking in complex societies (1987). Human thinking can only progress by introducing refined non-spontaneous concepts into everyday activities as shared principles. Instruction in these concepts is both an obligation and a necessity of a modern society. However, these scientific concepts usually have little or no connection to learners’ lived experiences. There is no reservoir of emotional memory, and the motivation it engenders, to feed the activity. Must education then choose one or the other? Therein lies the paradox.

Making sense of a paradox

In his infamous essay The Paradox of the Actor (1994) the French philosopher Denis Diderot argues actors must make a choice about approach to character. While it is difficult to let go of the energy and authenticity of everyday emotions, stage actions must be focused on the text of the poets. The texts serve as constant anchors to (on stage) activities lest performance fall into a stew of unpredictable and uncontrollable emotion-based actions. Even when actors use their emotions to capture the poet’s character in eloquent fashion, this discovery does not last until the next night or even the next moment. Diderot writes in Paradox (written as a dialogue between two actors):

FIRST: I want him to have a lot of judgment, for me there needs to be a cool, calm spectator inside this man, so I demand sagacity and no feeling, the power to imitate anything. Or, what amounts to the same thing, an equal aptitude for all characters and parts.

SECOND: No feeling!

FIRST: None … If the actor actually felt what he was doing, would it honestly be possible for him to play a part twice running with the same warmth and the same success? He would be full of warmth for the first performance and exhausted and cold as a stone for the third … If he’s himself when he acts, how will he stop being himself? If he wants to stop being himself, how will he know where the right point is to fix his performance? (Diderot [1830/1883]Diderot, 1994, pp. 104,105)

There is nothing more frustrating than an actor who cannot reclaim a found characterisation from one performance to the next because they have no fixed point, no north star guiding actions. Even though the actor loses energy and authenticity, Diderot suggests the only reliable choice is adherence to text-based performance, where actors can recreate the ingredients of their performance at will. Reliance on text becomes the norm for actors. Stage emotion is usually manufactured in the context of the poet’s text, carefully calibrated to achieve a desired effect. It is the emotion from the outside looking in, a pool of second-order affect, that becomes a consistent if flawed resource to be used across performances. Roles however are static, played the same way over again. Great actors become great mimics, imitating each other’s successful performances with little original thinking (at least realists like Konstantin Stanislavski believed). Productions could be highly entertaining, but theatre and the actor’s relationship with the audience would never advance because there is little room for the actor to explore the underlying meaning in the poet’s words, and little incentive for the poet to develop multi-level meaning in their words.

Vygotsky suggests both psychology (as explanation, 1997) and education (as process, 1987), advocating the text/scientific side of the paradox (e.g. the European gymnasium or the English Public School) and schooling leaned heavily on imitation of the teacher, disparaging emotional energy as capricious, leading to uncertain ends. The school child could recreate lessons but not create a dynamic relationship with the object of study. In his paper on the Actor’s Creative Work Vygotsky describes Diderot’s paradox as such: ‘must the actor experience what he portrays, or is his acting a higher form of “aping”, an imitation of an ideal prototype?’ (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 239). Vygotsky further suggests in his later work that educators face much the same question. We argue here that Vygotsky finds his way through this paradox by following the trail of the theatrical director and ‘psychologist of actors’, Konstantin Stanislavski, and his struggle to create a new theatre experience for actor and audience. Stanislavski looks to transcend choosing one or the other side of the paradox, by bringing the emotions of lived experience and the imitation of an ideal prototype together in unified activity. We suggest Vygotsky borrowed from Stanislavski’s ‘system’ in creating (or at least foreshadowing) a new model of learning and development, one where ‘the paradox and the contradiction contained in it find a resolution in the historical approach to the psychology of the actor’ (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 239). One idea emerging out of Vygotsky’s historical approach to psychology is zones of proximal development (ZPD) as part of an ever-expanding system of concepts. Veresov (2004) suggests we should understand ZPD as integrated into a larger system of concept development including social situation of development and Vygotsky’s genetic law. We suggest these and other constructs can be considered part of Vygotsky’s attempts to build a larger ‘system’ for learning and development (as sequential rather than integrated), similar to (though not as well realised as)² Stanislavski’s system, for breaking through the paradox of the learner. ZPD function as dynamic intellectual spaces where learners do the work of merging life experiences with high-level imitation as they attempt to adapt thinking to quickly shifting ecologies.

The remainder of the paper is divided into three parts. First, we offer some evidence for the possibility that Vygotsky’s later writings were influenced by Stanislavski’s systemic attempts to break through Diderot’s paradox. We argue that these ideas helped Vygotsky enter a new ZPD of thinking, expanding his own conceptual system of the meaning and process of education in a modern society. In the second part, we discuss the ways in which Vygotsky might have begun sketching out a model for breaking through the paradox of the learner. This section includes a revisiting and partial revision of (many interpretations of) the concept of ZPD as part of concept development. The third part offers a practical illustration of ‘creating’ new ZPD through instructional processes.

Stanislavski, Vygotsky, paradox and perezhivanie

There have been two general views on the role that theatre (and the humanities in general) played in Vygotsky’s thinking over his lifetime: 1) He was enamoured with the humanities in general and theatre in particular from an early age, but his thinking took a turn towards traditional psychological theory and philosophy as he matured as a scholar, 2) Vygotsky’s interests in the theatrical arts continued to influence his thinking, laying the groundwork explorations into a new psychology. This paper focuses on the latter perspective but with an important caveat. There might have been an influence/event/input between 1928–30 that pushed Vygotsky to return to his theatrical roots, playing an important role in his later theory development. Presumably, influences related to the revolution in the arts which occurred in Russia at the time might have had an indirect impact on his theory development. In many ways the apogee of this revolution was Konstantin Stanislavski’s summing up of his life’s work in theatre, An Actor’s Work (Stanislavski, 2008), a text Vygotsky seemed to have had access to through connections he developed as a theatre critic a few years earlier. Stanislavski looked to create a system for training actors that would help them break through Diderot’s paradox to create a unity of (the physical and the mental) action. Vygotsky may have seen in Stanislavski’s work a pathway for unravelling a similar paradox plaguing education and genetic psychology in general (Vygotsky, 1997). Smagorinsky (2011) suggests that Vygotsky’s use of (a variation of) Diderot’s paradox has been under-studied in the analysis of his theory building. We agree, believing the idea of a paradox became central to Vygotsky’s ideas on education and development as he extended his own system of psychological concepts.

Vygotsky’s intellectual relationship with Stanislavski started a few years before Stanislavski began putting words to paper. One of Vygotsky’s earliest essays (part of his dissertation) was, in many ways, a defence of Stanislavski’s approach to character development in the production of Hamlet staged by Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in 1912.³ Vygotsky seemed to move on from Stanislavski, the theatre and art in general, after publishing The Psychology of Art in 1925, with subsequent work concentrating more on traditional psychological/philosophical thinkers. His essays on the Crisis in Psychology (Vygotsky, 1997), however, suggest a dissatisfaction and restlessness with his more recent adopted field of interest. Vygotsky would return to some of Stanislavski’s seminal ideas on lived experience, around the turn of the decade. The question is what caused this re-animation of Vygotsky’s interest in theatrical concepts (for both Stanislavski and Vygotsky there is always a material reason)? One possible scenario involves Stanislavski’s long-time literary advisor, editor, and confidante Liubov Gurevich. Described as Russia’s pre-eminent female literary journalist of her time (Rabinowitz, 1998), Gurevich was an important presence around the MAT and wrote critiques of some of the same productions as Vygotsky (e.g. Meyerhold’s production of The Green Ring). Stanislavski completed early drafts of An Actors Work around 1928. He believed his work to have a strong psychological component. In a letter to a colleague Stanislavski wrote, ‘I’ve got on the track on new principles.⁴ These principles may turn the whole psychology of the actor’s creative process on its head’ (Benedetti, 1999, p. 184).

Gurevich feared that Stanislavski, in his quest to develop a psychology of the actor without doing much reading in psychology, was misusing basic terms. She recruited three psychologists to comment on the terminology in the manuscript (Benedetti, 1999). There is archival evidence, a letter from Gurevich to Stanislaski explaining the steps she was taking to refine the manuscript, stating Vygotsky was one of these psychologists. A few years later Vygotsky would write On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work (1999).⁵ The similarity of the title to Stanislavski’s own description of his work (see above), as well as the fact that Vygotsky originally presented this paper to a university section on The Psychology of the Actor chaired by Gurevich, suggests that Vygotsky was commenting directly on Stanislavski’s system (including its intellectual genesis) and its possibilities for a psychology, rather than his own views on the psychology of the actor. This is reinforced by Vygotsky’s use of some of Stanislavski’s language and concepts from the book and his work at the MAT in his later work.

On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work, Vygotsky re-introduces the term perezhinavie (he had used the phrase earlier in his theatre criticism and then again in the Psychology of Art), except this time in a much more comprehensive way. We believe Vygotsky uses perezhivanie in much the same way as Stanislavski. The great value of the system and perezhivanie for Vygotsky was as a path for overcoming a difficult paradox shared by theatre and general psychology. Legitimate actions are driven by lived experience immersed in what Stanislavski, taking from the French psychologist Ribot, would come to refer to as affective memory (the personal emotional component of development). Consistent problem-solving requires ‘a cool, calm spectator’ (Diderot, 11994 1994) inside the actor.

Vygotsky outlined Stanislavski’s system and his attempts to overcome the actor’s paradox as three-way interactions between the actor’s affective memories, the playwright’s text, and the historical moment. Perezhivanie (on the stage) represents the ways the three come together (this, of course, is our interpretation of Vygotsky’s interpretation of Stanislavski).

A Stanislavskian reading of the zone of proximal development

The zone of proximal development (and concept development) appears (in chapter six of Thinking and Speech) partially in response to Vygotsky’s self-posed paradox. Vygotsky describes Piaget’s ideas on concept development as a complete separation between spontaneous representations and (scientific) concept development: we cast off spontaneous concepts in favour of more advanced thinking because it is more efficacious for our activity (Piaget’s scheme for cognitive development,⁶ at least according to Vygotsky, ignores the necessity of motivation for completing productive activities). Vygotsky seems to agree with Piaget (and Diderot and Stanislavski) that emotional memory and dispassionate analysis are two completely different ways of understanding the world. But he questions if assuming a complete separation between the two through development, even with the best of intentions, is a productive way to explore the riddle of human thinking.

Fitting affect back into the development of thinking

Vygotsky’s spontaneous/everyday concepts, Ribot’s emotional memory and Stanislavski’s affective memory/personal perezhivanie intersect and are in some ways interchangeable. Stanislavski got the idea of emotional memory that re-emerges through new experiences from Ribot (Benedetti, 1999; Vygotsky, 1999). Vygotsky seems to have been influenced by Ribot’s work as well, as early as Psychology of Art (Vygotsky, 1971) and then again in his later writings on creativity (Smolucha, 1992) and applauds Stanislavski’s use of Ribot’s ideas. Ribot, in some parts of his text on emotions, refers to emotional memory as spontaneous. Vygotsky’s scientific concept we suggest can be equated with text (the words of the teacher as words of the poet). The true concept is truth on stage or in activity, actions that combine the energy and authenticity of emotions with the control offered through imitation of non-spontaneous (non-emotional) concepts within the dynamic of the historical moment. The actor does not have to play the ‘cool and calm’ spectator to know the ‘right point’ at which to ‘fix’ their perspective.

Vygotsky foreshadows possible intentions of abstracting out Stanislavski’s system from its theatrical housing and applying it to the development of human thinking:

Here we are approaching close to an extremely important psychological moment, the inexplicability of which was the cause, in our opinion, of a series of misunderstandings of the problem that interests us. For example, most of those writing about the system of Stanislavsky identified this system in its psychological part with the stylistic tasks that it initially served; in other words, they identified the system of Stanislavsky with his theatrical practical work. True, all theatrical practical work is a concrete expression of a given system, but does not exhaust the whole content of the system, which can have many other concrete expressions; theatrical practiced work does not present the system in all its range. (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 242)

If Vygotsky is following Stanislavski’s lead in attempting to solve a developmental paradox, and thereby increasing the ‘range’ of his system’s application, then bringing individuals to a place where evolved/refined spontaneous concepts (or everyday concepts) mediate scientific concepts in activity (externalised, for an audience) must be understood as an ongoing, arduous process. Vygotsky’s thinking on this type of ZPD seems encapsulated in his analysis of Stanislavski’s system:

This path is much more tortuous and, as Stanislavsky correctly notes, more like coaxing than direct arousal of the required feeling. Only indirectly, creating a complex system of ideas, concepts, and images of which emotion is a part, can we arouse the required feelings and, in this way, give a unique, psychological coloring to the entire given system as a whole and to its external expression. Stanislavsky says: “These feelings are not at all those that actors experience (perezhivaitsya) in life” (ibid.). They are more likely feelings and concepts that are purified of everything extraneous, are generalized, devoid of their aimless character.. (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 243)

Broken lines tied together by instruction: zones of proximal development

In Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Work students enter a workshop environment as neophytes to his system.⁷ The book is written as a journal of one of the students recounting how their teacher Tortsov (a stand-in for Stanislavski) takes his students on a journey towards theatrical truth. Each chapter represents a step in the journey. Tortsov gives different students specific tasks in varying theatrical situations (some based on a poet’s words, some he just makes up), all in service of developing their abilities to build a stage perezhivanie. As students attempt to accomplish complex and ambiguous tasks, Tortsov offers appraisal of and input to their problem-solving. The chapters usually find their end with intended realisations and questions from the students. Tortsov does not applaud the realisations or attempt to answer the questions. Instead he sends the students off to work on their acting skills through their own devices. This is the work of the actor. He addresses questions, but in his own time, when he thinks the students have developed an independent understanding of the lesson beyond simply imitating his instruction on stage. Only then are they ready to move to the next line of development.

In a famous example, Tortsov asks students to build a fire in a cold flat using a couple of props. He then extends the scene, adding personal emotions and historical moments to the scene, by telling students an important teacher is coming to their gathering. The students begin to mingle their emotional memories of being uncomfortable in a cold flat and (perhaps) the discomfort of having company in a penury state, with the social text of having to light a fire so as not to be embarrassed in front of a respected professor, and the historical moment of Moscow in winter after the revolution. The students get a completely different sense of lighting a fire as their actions take on increasing depth and meaning – but only in response to their teacher’s direction. The students begin to realise the power of the lesson but are left with questions about what this means for future actions on stage and how it comes to lead them to truth in their acting. Tortsov dismisses the class. The students have gone as far as they can through direct input – imitation of the poet’s words and/or the director’s instructions, now they must do the work to integrate Tortsov’s input into their thinking about how they develop character. The actions on stage reflect progress they can make in their craft under the careful watch of their teacher, but it does not yet translate into independent thinking they can take into a play on their own and use to guide other members of their company. In a later chapter devoted to the complex ideas of the interrelationships between action, belief, and truth, Tortsov focuses on a character counting money (this time using a famous scene from a play), emphasising the importance that they don’t mime the action but actually count. When they write a letter, they should write. The action creates the belief, which creates the truth, a concept the students may not have grasped after the lighting the fire activity (beyond their current zone of proximal development). They had to stretch their thinking to understand, something Tortsov could not give them with the best of direction. Neophyte students would not gain from the fire-lighting exercise. They might do the actions that Tortsov recommended but had not yet developed the capacity to connect how the historical moment (winter in Moscow) must influence their actions. This realisation was not yet reachable, was not within their zone of proximal development. The students who developed new questions and realisations out the fire-lighting were travelling through a more advanced zone of proximal development. But they were not yet ready to understand why you must write an actual letter even if the audience cannot see the words. The idea behind these connecting chapters is simple yet important if the focus is development (rather than theatrical learning). Vygotsky’s definition ‘the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem-solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86) takes on a different tenor. The initial scene (building a fire) was actors’ running around the stage aimlessly (and into each other), with little belief in what they are doing. The second scene, where the actors are more engaged with each other through perezhivanie as a result of Tortsov’s input, pushes the students to believe in their actions. The lesson attached to the scene of counting money was based on the actors’ work since the initial instruction of how perezhivanie can change actions from primarily imitation to emotion based and controlled at once. Now students were ready to take the next step in their understanding of character development.

In The problem of teaching and mental development, Vygotsky writes ‘We have no hesitation after all that has been said in stating the essential characteristic of teaching to be the creation of the zone of proximate development’ (Vygotsky, 2017, p. 368, emphasis added). Tortsov’s input to building a fire and then to counting money created a new way of thinking about what actors believe about their actions and poises the actors to eventually bring truth to the stage. Each time he must wait for the students to develop into the next lesson. ‘Cycles of development always precede cycles of teaching. Teaching is always tied to the tail of development, development always strides ahead of teaching’ (Vygotsky, 2017, p. 360). Tortsov could not have taught the importance of counting money in the targeted scene without his students’ development of integrating what they learned from the fire-starting scene into their thinking.

The current model suggests Vygotsky (1987, 2017) saw school (formal) education as a continuous cycle of instruction and development. In formal instruction, learners might spontaneously imitate higher level concepts in the same way they imitate the actions of others (high-level aping). Formal instruction, however, does not follow development but moves to the next instance of imitation. A lesser Tortsov yells to the students, ‘It is cold tonight in Moscow’, and the students feign shivering, but do not develop their beliefs about the importance of bringing contextual cues into character development because they are not ready. The next time they play the scene, they might remember to shiver but, in another scene of another play, one that is on a hot beach, they do not think to wipe their brow. The students have not yet developed the ability to use the concept independently. The lesser Tortsov does not think about whether the students have actually developed the concept of contextual cues and moves on to telling one of his favourite students, a particularly good mimic, they must actually write a letter if their actions are going to have meaning for the audience. This is not yet within their zone of development and the students might pretend to follow Tortsov’s direction, but question why they should do something that the audience will never see.

Discussing character development Stanislavski writes, ‘Thoughts and wants appear in fits and stages, they are born and die, then born again and die again’. If you were to express this in a diagram you would get a broken line, fragments, dashes’ (Stanislavski, 2008, pp. 284, emphasis added). Applying Stanislavski’s diagram to zones of proximal development, the sequence of development can be:

Development – Instruction/Direction ZPD – Development – Instruction/Direction ZPD

The directed action starts with what an actor can accomplish on their own, their affective memory combined with the playwright’s text. The actor’s creative work cannot progress further without some overt guidance or instruction tied to where development has left off, ‘died’. As the actor initially imitates the new input, their thinking moves forward into belief systems. The actor will only solidify what they learn when they take the newly developed concept and use it independently, so they develop as actors. Only then can Tortsov introduce the concept of the importance of action hidden from the audience, otherwise the actor/student will not understand.

This is also why the level of development of scientific concepts forms a zone of proximal possibilities for the development of everyday concepts. The scientific concept blazes the trail for the everyday concept. It is a form of preparatory instruction which leads to its development. (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 169)

At the beginning of a line or zone of development are everyday concepts. Vygotsky suggests young children learn everyday concepts, but without a workshop environment their thinking does not develop beyond high level imitation. As Vygotsky describes young students being prepared for new ZPD as they begin schooling, ‘their previous development (based primarily on imitation) are consolidating forms and functions of thinking in the child, which in the normal course of its development should by school age be dying⁸ and falling away, making place for new, more advanced forms of thinking, and changing through this reversal into a systematic form of thinking’ (Vygotsky, 2017, p. 367). Vygotsky’s concept of imitation is central to this process. When students are following teachers’ instructions, or collaborating with others in a shared project, using conceptual systems they have not yet consolidated in their own experience, they are imitating. It is still a high level of mimicry because they are not yet able to translate these concepts into their own independent activity (a cold winter night in Moscow does not automatically become a warm summer’s day at the beach). It is only development when the students make the concepts their own. While some suggest a more age-based interpretation of this mimicry development process, we suggest that for the most part building conceptual systems is primarily experience-based although age does play a very general part (Glassman, 2003).

Zones of proximal development as part of a larger whole

Zones of proximal development serve as the connecting bridge between endings and beginnings of development. Instruction in these cases should not be treated as unrelated to students’ history, emotions, or desired outcomes as these set the framework for productive instruction. Motivation to complete (or become better at) a task is an essential condition for development. A ‘wind’ that educators cannot manufacture must be found within the larger systems of affective memories, in order to prevent students’ thinking ’divorced from the full vitality of life, from the motives, interests, and inclinations of the thinking individual’ (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 50).

As an illustration of how perezhivanie (at least Vygotsky’s interpretation of it) can change and extend zones of proximal development, we offer development in playing chess among a generation of children/adolescent boys in the United States during the summer of 1972. In 1972 the chess ‘match of the century’ was taking place between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian champion Boris Spassky. The Soviets had dominated chess for almost three decades, and there was limited/niche interest in the game in the United States. When it became apparent that Fischer might prevail, the media began obsessively covering the matches (and the strange antics of Fischer). A younger generation became motivated to play chess over that summer. Young boys especially would carry chess boards with them and play each other at pools and in soda shops. However, individual abilities to extend and improve their play were limited, so some parents hired instructors. The instructors could move young boys forward, but the input to create new zones of proximal development was limited by previous development in play. Sometimes the young boys became frustrated and stopped playing. Sometimes the instructors became frustrated and stopped teaching. When Fischer won and the historical moment passed, many of the young chess players moved on to other interests, retaining little from their instruction. When the Netflix’s series Queen’s Gambit came out during the pandemic of 2020, it helped to create a similar historical moment not only in the U.S. but in many countries where Netflix was available, but this time mostly affecting young female chess players – pointing to the importance of specific attributes of the historical moment.

We suggest a Stanislavskian influenced model for concept development based on the four-step model:

1. Every successful cycle of development starts with a directed, volitional task based in a combination of emotional memory and shared social text embedded in a historical moment. An individual becomes motivated to solve a problem and/or successfully navigate a new activity. Desire to know outpaces current understanding (e.g. Young boys during the Fischer-Spassky match, young girls after watching Queen’s Gambit while trapped at home).

2. Motivated to become better at their task, the individual becomes open to instruction, the appraisal and input of others. Under guidance from adults or more advanced peers, the individual imitates proposed scientific concepts/social texts (e.g. use of the rook) in their play. Instruction sows the seeds of development.

3. Learners look to move beyond imitation by integrating new concepts into relevant everyday activities. The individual externalises and experiments with new concepts, so the new concepts become a natural part of their thinking across (similar) activities. This is the work of the learner leading to the development of systems of concepts.

4. The learner’s ability to experiment and surprise themselves and others with their play has its limits. Players find themselves in situations where they are unsure and make mistakes. The thrill of development fades away. This is the moment when the learner is most vulnerable, but also most open to instruction that might push their development forward. Does the learner walk away in frustration, keep trying without developing, or open themselves up to new appraisal and input? Much is determined by the learner’s motivation to continue, the quality of their relationship(s) with those who might offer input, the level of trust and of mutual acceptance, and the ability of potential interlocutor(s) to recognise and accept the everyday thinking of the learner with whom they are co-operating in the context of perezhivanie.

A model for creating self-perpetuating zones of proximal development through Perezhivanie

Interpersonal competencies play important motivational roles in concept development. Using (the first half of) Piaget’s Moral Judgement of the Child (Piaget, 1932) as a key example of development (of rules – as concepts – for playing marbles), Vygotsky writes ‘the source of development of the child’s will is its interrelationships’ (Vygotsky, 2017, p. 368)..⁹ Without interpersonal relationships it is far less likely learners will be motivated to voluntarily pursue difficult tasks and/or be willing to turn to others when they fall off the end of their ZPD in that pursuit. Successful instruction is dependent on others finding entry points for productive input into shared activities. This includes learners being open to new possibilities, and interlocutors being willing to offer appraisal and input with confidence and without judgement.

A three-step process in the ZPD: perezhivanie as a process of learning towards development

To promote development of thinking, educators must establish contexts where learners are motivated to overcome limitations in problem-solving/understanding through the integration of new, adaptive concepts, or systems of concepts. We operationalise Vygotsky’s initial response to the paradox of the learner as a recurrent three-step movement, both driven by and dependent on a combination of perezhivanie and interpersonal communications.

1) Preparation: Establishing active interest for engaging in problem-solving activity. This is best accomplished through activities that combine everyday concepts (based in affective memory), scientific concepts (e.g. shared social texts), and historical moment (being aware of what is important to learners and the ways instruction can align with it). One of most important tools in both motivating activity and successful instruction is (embedding actions in) trusted relationships, where individuals see those they are co-operating with on a problem as credible interlocutors/compatriots. Establishing a well-functioning, interconnected community is essential.

2) Volitional Activity: All development begins with motivated actions. The teacher uses the combination of perezhivanie and burgeoning community relationships (at least partially dependent on evolving interpersonal competencies) to facilitate co-operative problem-solving scenarios. Members of the community (which can be as few as two) externalise their current (everyday conceptual) thinking in attempts to solve or attain a better understanding of the problem. The members of the community reach a point where they recognise their current conceptual thinking is not capable of finding a satisfying solution. Other members of the community provide alternative approaches which are different from the individual’s thinking but not meant to nullify existing concepts. Instead, the next concepts add on to and/or extend their thinking into a larger scheme of understanding, creating a new pathway towards a zone of proximal development. The educator must recognise (in a variation of a famous Vygotskian phrase) the scientific concepts that learners imitate today can and should become their organic, true concepts tomorrow.

3) The scientific concepts evolve into more organic unified concepts through continued experimentation: The final step of concept development is individual experimentation within a new zone of proximal development. The learner is offered opportunities to continue to integrate new ideas and thinking into their conceptual system through volitional activities open to exploration. There are at least two ways to engender volitional activities. The first is to align instruction with activities/problems learners are already interested in pursuing (e.g. chess games). A second type of motivation is driven by maintenance and extension of interpersonal relationships (the children in a Swiss village wanted to play together – the game itself did not matter so much. It probably could have been any group-wide game).

In discussing volitional, open-ended group activities that might lead to development, Vygotsky wrote, ’ … just as inner speech and reflection arise from the inter-relationships between child and surrounding people, so the source of development of the child’s will is its inter-relationships’ (Vygotsky, 2017, p. 368). Just as important as what Vygotsky writes here is what he is referring to, the aforementioned marble game in Moral Judgement of the Child. Children begin to understand the meaning of rules as part of a conceptual system of what it means to play a game with others. It is the co-operative play and the shared desire of players to create a well-functioning, inclusive community that drives the volitional activity forward (Kuznetcova & Glassman, 2020). The historical moment – life in a Swiss village post World War I; affective memory – the children’s emotional experiences playing with each other over their lifetime; and social text, the shared game of marbles in that village, come together to create a moment of development: ‘a unity of environmental and personal features’ (Vygotsky, 1994).¹⁰

In the experiment we use as an illustration for this model the teacher builds perezhivanie by bringing together the historical moment, the personal experiences of the learners (4^th and 5^th graders at Midwestern middle schools, some of whom are part of immigrant families), and a shared social text in a problem-solving context. The experiment was part of a larger federally funded project on collaborative social reasoning and blended learning.¹¹ In this particular experiment the historical moment is the uptick in immigration issues based on the current political environment, the social text is a story about the struggles of an immigrant family that the students read together, and the personal perezhivanie is students’ life experience related to these issues, whether conversations at the dinner table or difficulties faced by friends or relatives.

First step

A small group of students (4th and 5th graders) are presented with a text focused on the disruption that immigration policy brings to families. The text and the historical problem were chosen with the intention of both accessing life experiences/affective memories (e.g. discussions around the dinner table, family crises) and discussing scientific concepts about immigration (what is the role of legal institutions in non-state sanctioned immigration?). The teacher facilitates discussions where students use the everyday concepts to mediate the scientific concepts expressed in the story. Differences between students’ expressions of their thinking (everyday concepts) are accentuated. The students are motivated to engage in a combination of affective memory (‘this is what I believe’) and shared problem-solving (as with the marble game, the students want the conversation to continue, if only to convince others of their position). The students must develop and use interpersonal skills for their discussion to gain intellectual traction.

Second step

In the second step students begin to struggle with their mediated concepts as a problem-solving community congeals, realising the potentially limited value in the way they express their ideas for bringing the group in their direction or creating some agreement on the problem at hand (teacher: ‘But what do you think of what Robin said about her neighbors?’). We hypothesise that students attempting to create a shared understanding will extend both their conceptual understanding of the topic and the ways they express them (e.g. using evidence). All students in the burgeoning community work from the same social text, but each child mediates these concepts in different ways based on everyday experiences. This type of co-operation requires increasingly high levels of interpersonal skills; abilities to share ideas without nullifying the thinking of others, to maintain a common goal, to listen to others and recognise when others are listening to them.

Third step

The third step of concept development is the beginning of the zone of proximal development – where the learner moves beyond imitating and to experimentation in their everyday thinking. The teacher continues to facilitate activities with similar problems. The student may bring new ideas back to the dinner table, or question what they see on television or read in their phone feed. In the current example the teacher brings the same students together to read shared texts and discuss problems that resemble the initial story after they have had a chance to experiment with concepts.

Conclusion

This paper suggests an interpretation of the zone of proximal development that leans heavily on the revolutionary ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski. Ideas always latent in Vygotsky’s thinking, from his earliest serious writing as a theatre critic in Moscow, to his intervening years in Gomel where he continued his passion for theatre and the arts (Sobkin, 2016) while beginning serious, academic exploration of education and human development, to his thesis on Hamlet. Vygotsky, as he extended his thinking into the human sciences, became restless and dissatisfied with the current state of his more recent passion, how and why we learn (Vygotsky, 1997). The interpretation of Vygotsky’s later work offered here suggests that Stanislavski’s ideas, including early drafts of An Actor’s Work, may have created an inflection point in Vygotsky’s thinking, including his emerging conceptions of imitation and zones of proximal development, and his desire to integrate them into a system of concept development leading Vygotsky to embrace the role of affect and emotional memory. Stanislavski’s work provided an opening to explore the relationships between affective memory, social text and the historical moment – encapsulated in perezhivanie.

We suggest the value of zones of proximal development is in helping us understand the relationships between instruction/direction¹² and development as individuals take on roles of productive, well-functioning members of fast adapting societies. Everyday concepts, based at least in part on affective memory, offer motivation and entry points to tasks that require socially derived scientific knowledge for successful completion. The learner engages in the ‘work of the learner’, merging the everyday with the scientific, externalising new thinking in pursuit of solutions. All lines of development come to an end. The key to moving forward is instruction helping individuals find their way to the next line of development. Initially the actor/learner needs the help of other(s), but eventually they reach a point where they can once again begin their own work of independent concept development.

What is less clear in Vygotsky’s work is how this relationship between instruction and zones of proximal development works in educational contexts. It is too easy to fall back on imitation in education, ‘high-level aping’, but no matter how precise the imitation, it is mimicry and not development. Individuals will just keep learning the same thing over again, refining the ways their everyday experiences mediate proximal scientific concepts, but never extending their thinking out in a wider conceptual system (e.g. critical thinking). In the second part of this paper we suggested one possibility for operationalising Vygotsky’s vision of zones of proximal development, working towards a self-perpetuating model of concept development. An educational model that looks to externalise mediated conceptual thinking, while fostering the types of interpersonal skills that help to create openness and trust in problem-solving. Interpersonal skills are necessary components for the type of input that will create new zones of proximal development. It is an intervention model that consciously attempts to push away from imitation, embracing Vygotsky’s later ideas, seriously confronting the paradox of the learner.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of the foundation. We would like to thank the research team and the many administrators, teachers, and children without whom this study would not have been possible. We especially thank Saes Byul Kim, Manisha Nagpal, Ziye Wen, Elizabeth Kraatz, Rebecca Sallade, Trent Cash, and Alyssa Tonissen for assisting in data collection and management. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Tzu-Jung Lin: [email protected].

Notes on contributors

Michael Glassman

Michael Glassman is a Professor of Educational Studies at the Ohio State University. His theoretical writing has included the work of John Dewey, L.S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget along with Paolo Freire and Orlando Fals Borda. His current work focuses on the human side of the Internet, including digital citizenship and possibilities for developing open and collaborative problem-solving communities that transcend traditional educational hierarchies., Specifically he is interested user issues such as Internet self-efficacy and online collective efficacy. He is also looking to apply a participatory action research framework to Internet activities.

Tzu-Jung Lin

Tzu-Jung Lin is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at The Ohio State University. Her research centres on understanding how students develop high-level thinking, literacy skills, and interpersonal competencies in school contexts and the associating instructional practices that are conducive to learning. She is currently leading a research team to develop a digital civic learning curriculum to foster elementary students’ civic reasoning, digital citizenship, and interpersonal competencies.

Seung Yon Ha

Seung Yon Ha is a postdoctoral researcher in Educational Psychology at The Ohio State University. Her work focuses on the development of individual thinking and belief about social/moral concepts and culturally responsive educational support for adolescents’ social and cognitive development.

Notes

1. This is our phrase, but we believe it encapsulates Vygotsky thinking in chapter six of Thinking and Speech.

2. Stanislavski built his system over decades. Vygotsky had only a few years.

3. Vygotsky’s advisor for his thesis on Hamlet was Yuri Aikhenvald, a well-known literary critic at the time. Aikhenwald believed in the analysis of stage plays based primarily on text. However, we suggest that a reading of Vygotsky’s essay with knowledge of Stanislavski’s 1912 staging suggests that Vygotsky was writing more from the perspective of the literary critics more concerned with realism and naturalism (e.g. Gurevich). There is an argument to be made that Vygotsky could be rebellious and somewhat mischievous in his work, one of the things that can make him difficult to understand.

4. Interestingly the new principles Stanislavski is talking about here come from a recent conversation he had about French psychologist Ribot and his ideas on emotional memory.

5. One interesting intersection is that Vygotsky decided to write his essay on Stanislavski’s system the same year that Piaget published The Moral Judgement of the Child: 1932. As will come clear later in the paper the first half of Moral Judgement (the marble game) became important to Vygotsky’s thinking in ways that tie back to Stanislavski.

6. The one place where Piaget does consider the importance of motivation in The Moral Judgement of the Child. This (at that point in history) anomaly was important to Vygotsky and, as mentioned earlier, will be discussed later in the paper.

7. In the real world actors at the MAT often rebelled against Stanislavski’s teaching and he was in continuous conflict with his co-artistic director Nemirovich.

8. It is interesting that Vygotsky uses some of the same language as Stanislavski such as ‘dying’ at the end of a period of development and at one point describes zones of proximal development as ‘inner developmental lines that school education promotes’ (1935, p. 369).

9. Piaget is often used as a foil in discussions of Vygotsky, but he also understood the value in much of Piaget’s research (Glassman, 1994). He even suggests that his general genetic law is in sympathy with Piaget’s description of the development of moral judgement.

10. In his discussion of environment, Vygotsky offers a darker version of perezhivanie, but one that might fit Stanislavski more closely. The historical moment – a visit to a clinic, the social text – a drunken, abusive mother, and personal perezhivanie, the individual child’s emotional experience with the mother. It is a scene that sounds eerily familiar to something Chekhov might write.

11. This research was supported by the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of the foundation. We would like to thank the research team and the many administrators, teachers, and children without whom this study would not have been possible. We especially thank Saes Byul Kim, Manisha Nagpal, Ziye Wen, Elizabeth Kraatz, Rebecca Sallade, Trent Cash, and Alyssa Tonissen for assisting in data collection and management. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Tzu-Jung Lin.

12. There has recently been some discussion about what Vygotsky meant in his use of the Russian word Obuchenie, whether it meant teaching or learning and how that impacted his theory (Barrs, 2017). We recently asked a Russian linguist about the correct meaning, and she seemed confused, saying it was a very common word with a general meaning. We have come to think that Vygotsky used the word Obuchenie in the same way Dewey used the word experience (Glassman, 2004), as a placeholder for a complex idea central to his thesis, but difficult to explain.