ABSTRACT
Vygotsky (1987a) argued that the human mind must be understood as the emergent outcome of cultural-historical processes. In Vygotsky (1997a), he showed how cultural-historically developed tools mediate the individual’s relation to the world and that the competence to handle such tools is acquired in social settings through guidance from other persons. He was concerned to develop an account in which humans were seen as active in ‘making themselves from the outside’ as they used, produced and modified culturally produced artefacts (tools, signs and symbols). It was suggested that through acting on things in the world they engage with the meanings that those artefacts embodied and acquired within social activity. Humans both shape those meanings and are shaped by them. The concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was created by Vygotsky as a means of explaining the way in which such social and participatory learning takes place (John-Steiner and Mahn, 1996).
