This Substack post is amazing:
https://monistowl.substack.com/p/beyond-the-ladder
- Re: the Importance of dialogue
- Some things have to be shown to you by a “More Knowledgeable Other”
- The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is where you can’t do something alone, but can do it if you’re scaffolded by someone else (a More Knowledgable Other)
- Unconditional Positive Regard is an example of something you can’t necessarily provide yourself, but can receive from someone else
- And, in the process of receiving it from a MKO, you can internalise the thing, and do it yourself:
Quotes from “Beyond the Ladder”
Vygotsky’s genius was to treat the mind not as a private museum but as a workshop with doors open to the street. Higher psychological functions arrive, initially, as relations, conducted with others by means of signs—most consequentially, language. The difference between a tool and a sign is crisp: a tool acts on the world; a sign acts on the self. The child’s first pointing is orchestrated socially: someone else directs attention and action. Through repetition in a cooperative frame, the child learns to direct their own attention; what was interpersonal becomes intrapersonal. This is internalization.
We will need three pieces from Vygotsky: (1) the notion that functions originate as social procedures before they become private resources; (2) the centrality of signs as levers by which a system can act on itself; and (3) the ZPD–MKO arrangement as the context in which reorganizations are made tractable rather than catastrophic.