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Vigostky – Education as social interaction

Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934)

Russian psychologist, worked on the cognitive development of language in its relationship with learning. According to Vygotsky, the child’s cognitive processes result from social interactions and their social conditions. With a diverse background, he performs various literary and artistic analyzes, defending the need for unification of the various human sciences, in what he called “cultural-historical psychology”). He proposed and worked in a laboratory and experimented with nomadic populations in Central Asia, including developing literacy work.

Vygostky

One of the areas where he pays the most attention is learning and language dysfunction, including various forms of disabilities and disabilities. He wrote among other questions “The Social Formation of Mind”, where he analyzes the genesis of human psychological processes, childhood and their historical-cultural influence.
Vygotsky makes for generation of Soviet intellectuals committed to the Russian revolution, whose work falls out of favor at Stalin’s time, being belatedly acknowledged. His work on symbols, myths and fables will later be followed by the formalists and folklore scholars.

The study of art and language will be crucial for its educational purpose, seen as tools of human mint to create a mediation between consciousness and its reality. That is why it gives special relevance to the symbolic systems that are the result of the social history of the communities.

The mind is socially constructed for Vygotsky, and art allows us to understand the intersubjective relationship of the artist’s relationship with society. With Vygostsky art can be used for practical applications in individuals with learning and neurological problems.

The study of language allows us to understand how the mind appropriates the social environment and gives answers that activate the superior neurological functions (memory, attention, thought). The appropriation of language allows the experience and sharing of a cultural universe. The ability to play, to invent are characteristics that the child develops before language, so that it represents a way of access to the symbolic universe of each one. Vygotsky is a profound inspirer for the role of innovation and creativity in learning.