INTRODUCTION
Who is Lev Vygotsky?
Birth:
Lev Vygotsky was born November 17, 1896
Death:
He died June 11, 1934.
Vygotsky's Early Life:
Lev Vygotsky was born in Orsha, a city in the western region of the Russian Empire. He attended Moscow State University, where he graduated with a degree in law in 1917. He studied a range of topics white attending university, including sociology, linguistics, psychology and philosophy. However, his formal work in psychology did not begin until 1924 when he attended the Institute of Psychology in Moscow and began collaborating with Alexei Leontiev and Alexander Luria.
Vygotsky's Career:
Lev Vygotsky was a prolific writer, publishing six books on psychology topics over a ten year period. His interests were quite diverse, but often centered on topics of child development and education. He also explored such topics as the psychology of art and language development.
Lev Vygotsky is considered a seminal thinker in psychology, and much of his work is still being discovered and explored today. While he was a contemporary of Skinner, Pavlov and Piaget, his work never attained their level of eminence during his lifetime. Part of this was because his work was often criticized by the Communist Party in Russia, and so his writings were largely inaccessible to the Western world. His premature death at age 38 also contributed to his obscurity.
Despite this, his work has continued to grow in influence since his death, particularly in the fields of developmental and educational psychology. http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/vygotsky.htm
What is Sociocultural Theory?
http://www.docslide.com/vygotskys-sociocultural-theory/
This theory stresses the interaction between developing people and the culture in which they live. Sociocultural theory states that children’s learning and cognitive development is a result of social interactions with more knowledgeable others and their