• DOI:10.1086/444328
• Corpus ID: 142282282

Vygotsky and the Vygotskians

@article{Simon1987VygotskyAT,
  title={Vygotsky and the Vygotskians},
  author={Joan Simon},
  journal={American Journal of Education},
  year={1987},
  volume={95},
  pages={609 - 613}
}

• Joan Simon
• Published 1 August 1987
• Psychology
• American Journal of Education

tion of Mind by James Wertsch, himself primarily interested in linguistics and semiotics, who edited the report of the 1980 conference run by the Center for Psychosocial Studies at Chicago, Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives (1985). The aim is to "harness" the integrated and social approach elaborated by Lev Vygotsky in postrevolutionary Russia to humanities and social sciences suffering from narrowness and inability to communicate in modern America. Accordingly, Wertsch deprecates the usual classification of Vygotsky as a developmental and educational psychologist, indeed as a psychologist at all. This, despite the fact that he is widely known as founder of the leading trend in current Soviet psychology, the Vygotsky-Luria-Leontiev school, which has been developing his work for half a century. But the proposition accords with a project to return to the original writings, in particular to relatively neglected semiotic aspects of an order now in the forefront of attention, although there is readiness to turn to Soviet psychology should this contribute to discussion of selected points. Such a project is in the cards because Vygotsky was a young man in a hurry. Intensely interested in current cultural innovations, a practicing teacher for six years with a special interest in mental backwardness, he gravitated toward psychological research after astounding a specialist conference with ideas that had never occurred to them. But he was