ABSTRACT
This chapter is an outline of educational conceptions developed by the two distinguished theorists of education, John Dewey and Lev S. Vygotsky. The chapter focuses around such issues as the pragmatic view of learning as a process, largely facilitated in its social constructivist and democratic settings. It also discusses the notions of learning as internalization of knowledge and the Zone of Proximal Development. Subsequently, the outline is used to advocate the claim that the two early 20th-century conceptions discussed are in many ways pertinent to contemporary language and translation classrooms. To illustrate this point from a pragmatic angle, a section presenting two classroom activities is provided. The activities use translation as a pedagogic tool of multilingual negotiating of senses and as underlying communicative, social and cultural interactions of the classroom participants. Another objective that the chapter pursues is to advocate the claim that interpreting educational conceptions requires the interpreter’s readiness to accept more than one interpretative path. For one thing, as observed by many specialists in the field, the way in which educationists put their ideas into words often makes interpretation troublesome. Apart from that, the effort to interpret educational thought that is over a hundred years old calls for re-interpretation rather that for seeking interpretative equivalence.
