A little knowledge is a dangerous thing: A cautionary tale for users of Vygotsky’s work

I was recently at a conference when a question from the floor regarding the challenges of teaching in our overcrowded classrooms in South Africa elicited the passionate response that we should teach reading “by using mediation, like scaffolding tasks”. Which is of course, fine, provided, though, that we know what we mean by mediation and scaffolding. And here is the crux of the matter: the popularity of these terms has led to them losing coherence and becoming basically rhetorically hollow. What often follows some of the better definitions of scaffolding is a list of ‘how to’ that teachers draw on to ‘scaffold’. Not unlike a recipe, except one crucial element seems to be missing from many accounts of scaffolding and this is: what exactly is being ‘cooked up’ when scaffolding is being used and is scaffolding synonymous with mediation? The notion of mediation commonly used in education and psychology comes to us from the Russian psychologist Vygotsky. Scaffolding, conversely, comes from the work of Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976). An investigation of these terms, used so frequently as synonyms, underpins this paper and its focus on recovering the work of Vygotsky as he intended it, showing how concepts such as mediation in the zone of proximal development have become disembedded from their epistemological foundations, enabling them to be used as de-historicized surgically enhanced tools to solve current educational ills. Hence the commitment in this paper is to trace the theoretical roots of the terms: scaffolding, mediation, spontaneous and scientific concepts, and the zone of proximal development, ultimately situating these terms within their epistemological bases. In doing this I hope to show how these concepts have come to be situated within a radical constructivist epistemology and how this has effectively stripped them of their meaning. While predominantly a theoretical paper, the paper draws on data from 39 in-service teachers registered for an Honours degree in education and their perceptions of what effective teaching/learning is. Findings from this data illustrate a trend towards a domesticated view of Vygotsky’s work, distilled into simplistic steps for teaching well. This paper represents an attempt to reclaim the legacy of Vygotsky.