I first encountered Vygotsky through Linguistics and Literature in Brazil, where his work was closely connected to language, teaching, discourse, and cultural participation. Meeting him again while studying psychology in the UK felt unexpectedly different.
The same theorist seemed to appear through a more practical vocabulary: the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), scaffolding, mediation, and dynamic assessment.
I am not yet an Educational Psychologist. I am a psychology student hoping to enter the field, and these reflections come from moving between two areas that have shaped how I think. That movement made me notice something I could not easily ignore. What happens when a theory as broad as Vygotsky’s becomes a toolkit for practice? What is gained by making it usable, and what might be left behind?
Vygotsky beyond psychology
Vygotsky’s work belongs fully to psychology, but it cannot be contained by psychology alone. His theory of development is also a theory of language, culture, learning and social participation. For Vygotsky, language was not merely a way of communicating thoughts that already existed. It was one of the cultural tools through which thought, self-regulation, and participation developed. People learned through interaction with others and through access to the language and practices of their communities (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987).
This was the Vygotsky I recognised through my background in Letras, the Brazilian field that brings together language, literature, applied linguistics, and teacher education. In this context, language was rarely treated as a neutral set of rules. It was a form of social action. Reading, writing, and speaking were ways of entering cultural and institutional worlds.
Learning to write an academic essay, for example, is not only about mastering paragraph structure. It also involves learning how to make an argument, respond to other voices, cite evidence, and position oneself within a scholarly conversation. The teacher is helping the learner enter a new way of thinking and participating.
This understanding connects with language and genre traditions in which writing is treated as a socially organised practice rather than an isolated technical skill (Motta-Roth, 2009; Schneuwly & Dolz, 2004). A genre carries expectations about who can speak, how knowledge should be presented, and what counts as a legitimate contribution.
Language therefore has a relationship with access and power. Literacy therefore is not simply the ability to decode written symbols. It can influence who is heard, who is taken seriously, and who is able to participate in educational and public life. The language valued by an institution is never entirely neutral. Some ways of speaking and writing are recognised as evidence of intelligence while others may be interpreted as inadequate or deficient.
A Vygotskian perspective can challenge this because it shifts attention away from the idea that success or difficulty belongs only inside the individual. Development also depends on the cultural tools made available to the learner, the quality of the mediation they receive, and the value attached to their forms of language.
When theory becomes a toolkit
When I encountered Vygotsky again through psychology and education, I met a more practical version of him. His work appeared through concepts such as the ZPD, scaffolding, and dynamic assessment.
The ZPD draws attention to the distance between what a learner can do independently and what they may be able to do with guidance (Vygotsky, 1978). Scaffolding describes temporary assistance that helps a learner complete a task that would otherwise be beyond their current independent ability (Wood et al., 1976). Dynamic assessment examines how a learner responds when teaching or mediation is introduced during the assessment process, rather than treating ability as something fully revealed by unaided performance (Lidz, 1995).
These ideas are valuable because they resist fixed views of ability. If a child is assessed only through what they can do alone at one particular moment, their potential may be underestimated. A prompt, visual aid, demonstration, carefully rephrased instruction or opportunity to practise may reveal something that an independent score does not.
I think the difficulty begins when these concepts become separated from the wider theory that produced them. Scaffolding can become a teaching technique. The ZPD can become a diagram. Dynamic assessment can become another method to place in a professional toolkit. The concepts remain useful, but the broader questions about language, culture, history, and participation may disappear.
Daniels (2018) raises a related concern about readings of Vygotsky that lose some of the historical, methodological, and transformative force of his work. Educational psychologists, teachers, and other professionals need usable ideas but there is a risk that usability may come at the expense of theoretical depth.
Different disciplines, different Vygotskys
Each discipline seems to translate Vygotsky through its own concerns. The strand of Letras I encountered foregrounded language, discourse, genre, and cultural participation. Educational psychology more often foregrounds learning potential, assessment, intervention, and support. Neither version is wrong, but neither is complete.
A language-focused reading may underplay the emotional, cognitive, and developmental realities of individual learners. A practice-focused psychological reading may underplay the linguistic, cultural, and institutional conditions that shape learning in the first place.
This matters in educational psychology because schools are saturated with language. Almost every judgement made about a child is mediated through instructions, assessments, behaviour policies, reports, conversations, labels, expectations, and feedback. A difficulty may be interpreted as cognitive, behavioural, or motivational when it is also linguistic, cultural, or relational.
A bilingual learner, for example, may appear to have limited ability when assessed through unfamiliar academic language. Their difficulty may lie less in understanding the underlying idea than in accessing the language through which they are expected to demonstrate it. What looks like limited reasoning may partly reflect limited familiarity with the discourse of the task.
A neurodivergent child may be described as resistant, disengaged, or inflexible when the communicative and sensory demands of the environment are unclear or overwhelming. The difficulty may be located inside the child even when the environment is making participation unnecessarily hard.
A wider Vygotskian perspective would ask not only what the child can or cannot do. It would also ask; what language is required? Which classroom behaviours are treated as normal? What forms of communication are recognised? What assumptions shape the task? What support is present and what is missing?
From individual difficulty to contextual access
Educational psychologists need approaches that can inform consultation, assessment, and recommendations, so the issue is not practicality itself as opposed to forgetting that every practical tool comes from a wider way of understanding the learner.
In assessment, a fuller Vygotskian approach would ask whether a child’s performance reflects ability or access to the language, norms, and cultural tools required by the task. It would consider not only the ‘score’ produced but the conditions under which that score became possible.
In consultation, it might shift the question from “What is wrong with this child?” towards “What is this environment asking of this child, and what forms of mediation are present or absent?” This change matters because it affects where responsibility is located. It invites adults to examine:
- instructions
- routines
- relationships
- sensory demands
- language expectations
- interpretations of behaviour
In intervention, scaffolding should encourage adults to examine whether expectations are inclusive, culturally fair, and linguistically accessible. A scaffold may help a child enter an inaccessible system, but it should also prompt us to ask why the system was inaccessible in the first place.
Bringing the Vygotskys together
Educational psychology already recognises that children develop within systems, relationships and contexts. Reconnecting applied Vygotskian concepts with his wider account of language and culture could deepen that commitment. It could help educational psychologists look beyond the child’s access to a task and ask whether the task, the language of instruction, classroom norms, and institutional expectations are themselves accessible.
I am not suggesting that Brazilian Letras or UK educational psychology uses Vygotsky in one uniform way. Scholars have long shown that Vygotsky has been interpreted and reconstructed differently across intellectual traditions (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Nor am I writing from professional authority as an Educational Psychologist. I am writing as a student moving between disciplines who noticed that the same theorist seemed to become a different person depending on where I encountered him.
That position has limits, but it also offers a useful view. It allows me to notice how language can disappear when theory becomes technique, and how individual psychological development can disappear when attention remains only on discourse and social practice. Each perspective can correct the other.
A sophisticated use of Vygotsky requires more than citing the ZPD or using the word scaffolding. It requires a way of seeing. It means seeing learning as relational and developmental, support as cultural, and difficulty as contextual. Children do not develop in empty space. They develop inside classrooms, families, languages, histories, and institutions.
Perhaps there is not one Vygotsky, but several Vygotskys created by different disciplines. The Vygotsky I met through Linguistics and Literature reminds me that language is never only a vehicle for thought. It is one of the places where thought, identity, and belonging are formed. The Vygotsky I met through psychology reminds me that ability is never fully visible in independent performance. It is revealed through mediation, relationships, and support.
Taken together, these versions offer a more humane understanding of development. Learners are not fixed individuals moving through neutral systems. Their possibilities depend partly on the cultural tools, relationships, and environments available to them.
This is where Vygotsky remains most powerful. He does not simply ask what a person is. He asks what a person may become when the world around them changes.
References
Daniels, H. (2018). Vygotsky: Between socio-cultural relativism and historical materialism. From a psychological to a pedagogical perspective. Cultural-Historical Psychology, 14(3), 36–42.
Lidz, C. S. (1995). Dynamic assessment and the legacy of L. S. Vygotsky. School Psychology International, 16(2), 143–153.
Motta-Roth, D. (2009). Popularização da ciência como prática social e discursiva. In D. Motta-Roth & M. E. Giering (Eds.), Discursos de popularização da ciência (Vol. 1, pp. 131–195). PPGL Editores.
Schneuwly, B., & Dolz, J. (2004). Gêneros orais e escritos na escola (R. Rojo & G. S. Cordeiro, Trans. & Eds.). Mercado de Letras.
van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis. Blackwell.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton (Eds.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1. Problems of general psychology (N. Minick, Trans.; pp. 39–285). Plenum Press.
Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100.
