ABSTRACT
Although originating in psychology, the importance of Vygotsky’s work lies in the way in which it has increasingly come to contribute to the knowledge base of other disciplines. Over the past 40 years, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind has variously been described as a theory of cognition (Luria, 1981), a theory of education (Bruner, 1985), a theory of language development (Bronckart, 1995), a theory of semiotics (Rommetveit, 1985), and a social theory of human development (Wertsch, 1990). His work explains how all cognitive development has its origins in social enterprise and so it has come to inform many approaches to pedagogy that value the collective nature of learning as well as the pedagogical worth of group work as a means to stimulate individual growth. Such approaches include dierentiated instruction (DI), project-based learning (PBL), and constructivist pedagogy (CP). e instructional implications of these approaches will be discussed later in chapter 2.2.
