Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky

 

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (according to the Cyrillic transliteration in Belarusian: Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, in Russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский) (November 17, 1896, Orsha, Russian Empire, present-day Bi Elorrussia-June 10, 1934, Moscow, Soviet Union) or Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and epistemologist of Jewish origin, one of the most prominent theorists of developmental psychology, founder of cultural-historical psychology and a clear precursor of Soviet neuropsychology, of which the Russian doctor Aleksandr Lúriya would be the greatest exponent. .[1] His work was recognized and disclosed by the academic media of the Western world in the 1960s.

The prolific nature of his work and his early death made him known as "the Mozart of psychology" (characterization created by Stephen Toulmin). The fundamental idea of ​​his work is that the development of humans can only be explained in terms of social interaction. Development consists of the internalization of cultural instruments (such as language) that initially do not belong to us, but belong to the human group in which we are born, which transmits cultural products to us through social interaction. Culture, then, has a preponderant role in Vygotsky's theory: "individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social environment...in which the child is included (Tudge and Rogoff, 1989). The child uses some kind of 'tool' or 'sign' for converting social relations into psychological functions"

He was born into a prosperous Jewish family near Vitebsk, the second of a family of eight children. Before reaching his first year, his family moved to Gomel, where he grew up. In his teens he was a fan of theater and painting he decided to rewrite his last name Vygotsky, instead of Výgodskiy ("výgoda" means "benefit" in Russian), as it was originally. At just 19 years old, in 1915, he wrote an essay on Hamlet. His time at the university between 1913 and 1917 was not without its incidents: he enrolled in medicine and just a month later he switched to law at the University of Moscow. After a year he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Popular University, content that had already fascinated him as a high school student. The Popular Universities were part of the framework of liberal educational institutions parallel to the oldest and most prestigious institutions linked to Tsarism. In this university, for example, women and people of any religion were accepted.[3] He then returned to Gomel, with a difficult desire to fulfill: to teach psychology and literature. Precisely at that time, due to the October Revolution, all discrimination against Jews was abolished. From this fact, Vygotsky would begin to be linked to political activity. Its various activities would make it the center of Gomel's intellectual and cultural activity. He taught Russian grammar and literature at the Labor School for the workers; he taught psychology and logic at the Pedagogical Institute; aesthetics and art history at the Conservatory; he directed the theater section of a newspaper and founded a literary magazine. At this time he dedicated himself to reading Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov and Aleksandr Potebnyá (en: Alexander Potebnja, linguist in Kharkiv). In 1919, he contracted tuberculosis and in 1920 he was admitted to a sanatorium (it was considered, due to the danger of the bacteria, that the patient had to be isolated from all contact). Sensing that his life would be short, he intensified his spirit of work. At the Pedagogical Institute, he created a psychology laboratory to study kindergarten children with learning delays. From here he obtained fundamental material for his book Psicología pedagogica, published in 1926. In 1924, Vygotsky married Rosa Nóievna Sméjova (died 1979), from whose union two daughters were born: Guita Lvovna Vygódskaya and Ásya Lvovna Vygódskaya.

Its bibliography includes 180 titles. Eighty of them have not been published. His most important work is Thought and Language (1934). Its greatest specialist is James V. Wertsch; in Spain, Angel Riviere. He integrated the diversity of other fields of knowledge in a creative way: he explained with a novel meaning the role of society, culture and language in the development of the human being.[4]​Some of his works were cut by the censorship from 1936. They were considered anti-Marxist and anti-proletarian by the Stalinist authorities. He never ceased to be mentioned in public forums, except for the critiques of Kózyrev and Turko "Pedagogy at Professor Vygotsky's school" and Rudneva's "Vygotsky's Pedagogical Distortions", nor his contained and referenced theories. Proof of the latter are the thirty references to his work in the 1940 edition of Rubistein's "Foundations of General Psychology" or his presence in the suggestion "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" of 1940.

Jean William Fritz Piaget

Jean William Fritz Piaget (Neuchâtel, August 9, 1896-Geneva, September 16, 1980), known as Jean Piaget, was a Swiss psychologist, epistemologist and biologist, considered the father of genetic epistemology (related to the generation of new knowledge, the result of the development of structures and from functional mechanisms that are maintained throughout development; see also genetic psychology), recognized for his contributions to the study of childhood and for his constructivist cognitive theory of intelligence development, from an evolutionary proposal of interaction between the subject and the object.

The eldest son of the Swiss Arthur Piaget and the French Rebecca Jackson, Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, a city in French-speaking Switzerland. His father was a leading professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. His maternal grandfather, James Jackson, was the creator of the first crucible steel factory in France. Jean Piaget was a precocious child who developed an early interest in biology and the natural world, especially molluscs. At the age of 11, while he was studying at the Latino Institute in his hometown, he wrote a study referring to a certain species of albino sparrow and later wrote a treatise on malacology during his high school studies. He graduated and doctorated in natural sciences at the University of Neuchâtel in 1918, with a thesis on the molluscs of the canton of Valais. Until his transfer to Paris in 1919, he worked for a brief period at the University of Zurich where he published two papers on Psychology. At that time his interest in Psychoanalysis began, a context in which he also delved into the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. He was analyzed by Sabina Spielrein (years later he would attend the Congress of Psychoanalysis in Berlin in 1922, where he also met Freud personally).

His main influences, in addition to those of Alfred Binet, were those of James Mark Baldwin, from whom he took the notions of adaptation by assimilation and accommodation in circularity (circularity can be understood as feedback). Through Baldwin he received the influence of Spencer's evolutionary philosophy, a philosophy directly imbued with Darwin's theory. Piaget thus undertook his theorizing and achieved his discoveries having a perspective that is at the same time biological, logical and psychological, coming together in a new epistemology. That is why he talks about a genetic epistemology, understanding here epistemology, not as the branch of philosophy that studies science, but as the investigation of cognitive abilities (in an absolutely empirical way, which also differentiates it from Gnoseology). Regarding the use of the genetic concept, it does not refer so much to the field of biology that studies genes, but rather to the investigation of the genesis of thinking in humans, although Piaget certainly recognizes that such a genesis of thinking has a large proportion ( though by no means entirely) patterns that derive from genes. However, and it is one of Piaget's great discoveries, thinking unfolds from a genetic base only through sociocultural stimuli, just as thinking is configured by the information that the subject receives, information that the subject always learns in a different way. active, no matter how unconscious and passive the processing of information may seem.

Anton Semenovich Makarenko

 

Born: 13 January 1888 Belopolye, Sumskoy Uyezd, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire (now Sumy Oblast, Ukraine.)

Died: 1 April 1939 (aged 51) Golitsyno, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.

Occupation: Educator, writer.

Language: Russian

Citizenship: Soviet

Subject: Educational theory, Pedagogy, Correctional education.

Anton Semenovich Makarenko, a Soviet educator, uncle of Lydia Makarenko, great uncle of Matthew, Natalya and Cameron Marr, social worker and writer, became the most influential educational theorist in the Soviet Union;he promoted democratic ideas and principles in educational theory and practice. As one of the founders of Soviet pedagogy, he elaborated the theory and methodology of upbringing in self-governing child collectives and introduced the concept of productive labor into the educational system. Makarenko is often reckoned by whom among the world's great educators, and his books have appeared in many countries.

In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917, he established self-supporting orphanages for street children — including juvenile delinquents — left orphaned by the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923. These establishments included the Gorky Colony and later the Dzerzhinsky labor commune (where the FED camera was produced) in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Makarenko wrote several books, of which The Pedagogical Poem, a fictionalized story of the Gorky Colony, became especially popular in the USSR.A 1955 Soviet movie with English title Road to Life was based on this book. Makarenko died under unclear circumstances in 1939.

In 1988 UNESCO ranked Makarenko as one of four educators (along with John Dewey, Georg Kerschensteiner, and Maria Montessori) who determined the world's pedagogical thinking of the 20th century.

Makarenko's pedagogy is based on practice and experience, as we have already said. This was the only thing that helped him solve the real problems in the Gorki colony. Due to the characteristics with which the children arrived at the colony, Makarenko affirmed that the child is neither good nor bad by nature, but education is what ultimately decides this aspect.

To solve the problems that were lived in the colony, Makarenko based his pedagogy on two main points: the creation of group consciousness and productive work.

To create group consciousness he had the idea of dividing the children into small stable groups of 4 or 5 children among which there was a leader. This allowed the creation of a consolidated group that favored the re-education of children.

But experience showed that this group consciousness was referred only to this small stable group, so Makarenko decided to create unstable work groups for extraordinary tasks made up of one member of each group. Responsibility also varied, as Makarenko believed that children should learn both to obey and to command.

 Makarenko and education totally committed and was subject to two fundamental objectives that he assigns to education which are based on two exemplary pillars:

· His confidence in Soviet society.

· His faith in the possibilities of education.

Regarding the first point, Makarenko extols the new situation in his country, convinced that the 1917 revolution brought Russia to the pinnacle of history and marked the beginning of a new order in human relations and morality and that the Russian youth became a world phenomenon incomparable to any other, he was therefore proud to be a citizen of the Soviet Union, and as such he permanently dedicated himself to work and educational creation.

He orients his pedagogy to the formation of men capable, in turn, of also being active builders of communism, he considers that education is the expression of the pedagogue's political creed and that his knowledge only plays an auxiliary role, consequently, the Makarenko's pedagogy could only be a communist pedagogy.

Makarenko does not accept that education should be based on the needs of the child and rather, the needs that should be placed more emphasis on those of the community, of society, of the country and the feeling of duty has to go always linked to those needs; He also believes that man moves according to the laws of nature and consequently the role of education consists of: EDUCATE that nature based on that society, in such a way that the Soviet educators are not the servants of nature but the TEACHERS.

Ivan Dominic Illich

 

Born: September 4, 1926 Vienna, Austria.

Died: December 2, 2002 (aged 76) Bremen, Germany.

Era: Contemporary philosophy.

Region: Western philosophy.

School: Catholicism.

Main interests: Philosophy of educationphilosophy of technology.

 Ivan Dominic Illich was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticizes modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialized society widely impairs quality of life by over-medicating life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions. Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim.

 The presentation of an educator like Iván Illich is not an easy task. It is, first of all, a thinker located in a particular historical context, such as that of the 1960s. A period characterized by radical criticism of the capitalist order and its social institutions. Among these, the school.

It is also a complex personality. In those years it was said of Iván Illich that he was an intelligent man who liked to surround himself with intelligent people and it was difficult for him to hide his contempt for what he considered stupidity. He could be the friendliest man in dealing with him or brutally ridicule those who questioned him. Tireless worker, polyglot, cosmopolitan, his ideas, whether they were about the Church and its changes, culture and education, medicine or transportation in modern societies, generated controversies that ended up transforming him into one of the characters of his time. .

However, Illich himself was partly causing the controversies: his personality, his style, his working methods, the radicalism of his ideas. In fact, for educators, Illich is the father of de-schooling education, the author who irreducibly condemns the school system and schools, characterizing them as one of the many public institutions that perform anachronistic functions that do not keep up with the speed of progress. changes and only serve to stabilize and protect the structure of the society that produced them.

Illich argues that school teaches that the result of attendance is valuable learning, that the value of learning increases with the amount of input information, and that this value can be measured and documented through degrees and diplomas.

JOHN DEWEY AND PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY

 

Born October 20, 1859, Burlington, Vermont, U.S.—died June 1, 1952, New York, New York), American philosopher and educator who was a cofounder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, an innovative theorist of democracy, and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United States.

Dewey graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont in 1879. After receiving a doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he began teaching philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan. There his interests gradually shifted from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to the new experimental psychology being advanced in the United States by G. Stanley Hall and the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James. Further study of child psychology prompted Dewey to develop a philosophy of education that would meet the needs of a changing democratic society. In 1894 he joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he further developed his progressive pedagogy in the university’s Laboratory Schools. In 1904 Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in New York City, where he spent the majority of his career and wrote his most famous philosophical work, Experience and Nature (1925). His subsequent writing, which included articles in popular periodicals, treated topics in aesthetics, politics, and religion. The common theme underlying Dewey’s philosophy was his belief that a democratic society of informed and engaged inquirers was the best means of promoting human interests.

Being, nature, and experience

In order to develop and articulate his philosophical system, Dewey first needed to expose what he regarded as the flaws of the existing tradition. He believed that the distinguishing feature of Western philosophy was its assumption that true being—that which is fully real or fully knowable—is changeless, perfect, and eternal and the source of whatever reality the world of experience may possess. Plato’s forms (abstract entities corresponding to the properties of particular things) and the Christian conception of God were two examples of such a static, pure, and transcendent being, compared with which anything that undergoes change is imperfect and less real. According to one modern version of the assumption, developed by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, all experience is subjective, an exclusively mental phenomenon that cannot provide evidence of the existence or the nature of the physical world, the “matter” of which is ultimately nothing more than changeless extension in motion. The Western tradition thus made a radical distinction between true reality on the one hand and the endless varieties and variations of worldly human experience on the other Dewey held that this philosophy of nature was drastically impoverished. Rejecting any dualism between being and experience, he proposed that all things are subject to change and do change. There is no static being, and there is no changeless nature. Nor is experience purely subjective, because the human mind is itself part and parcel of nature. Human experiences are the outcomes of a range of interacting processes and are thus worldly events. The challenge to human life, therefore, is to determine how to live well with processes of change, not somehow to transcend them.

Histories

The constancy of change does not imply a complete lack of continuity with the past stages of natural processes. What Dewey meant by a history was a process of change with an identifiable outcome. When the constituent processes of a history are identified, they become subject to modification, and their outcome can be deliberately varied and secured. Dewey’s conception of a history has an obvious implication for humanity: no person’s fate is sealed by an antecedently given human nature, temperament, character, talent, or social role. This is why Dewey was so concerned with developing a philosophy of education. With an appropriate knowledge of the conditions necessary for human growth, an individual may develop in any of a variety of ways. The object of education is thus to promote the fruition of an active history of a specific kind—a human history.

Dewey joined and gave direction to American pragmatism, which had been initiated by the logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in the mid-19th century and continued into the early 20th century by William James, among other thinkers. Anticipating Dewey, James regarded reality as an array of “buzzing” rather than static data, and he argued that the distinction between mental experience and the physical world is “messy” rather than pristine. Another theme of early pragmatism, also adopted by Dewey, was the importance of experimental inquiry. Peirce, for example, praised the scientific method’s openness to repeated testing and revision of hypotheses, and he warned against treating any idea as an infallible reflection of reality. In general, pragmatists were inspired by the dramatic advances in science and technology during the 19th century—indeed, many had formal scientific training and performed experiments in the natural, physical, or social sciences.

Paulo Freire

 Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was one of the greatest and most significant educators of the 20th century. With the beginning of his dialogue, he taught a new path for the relationship between teachers and students. His ideas influenced and continue to influence democratic processes throughout the world. He was the pedagogue of the oppressed and in his work he transmitted the pedagogy of hope. He influenced the new liberation ideas in Latin America and in the theology of liberation, in the European and African pedagogical renewals, and his figure is a constant reference in liberation politics and in education. He was an emigrant and exiled for political reasons due to dictatorships. For a long time his domicile was the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland

Biography of Paulo Freire

He was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1921. In 1947, he was director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service of Industry. He studied literature and received his doctorate in 1959 in Philosophy and History of Education with the thesis « Education and Brazilian news » , which lays the foundations of his method, according to which all educational processes must start from the reality that surrounds each individual.

In the 1950s, he belonged to the first Pernambuco State Council of Education. In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of the University of Recife. In 1963 he put into practice his first group educational experience, within the National Literacy Campaign, achieving the literacy of 300 rural workers in a month and a half. He was accused by the oligarchy and by certain sectors of the Church of being a political agitator.

As a consequence of the military coup of 1964, he had to abandon his activity, described as subversive, and sought refuge in Chile, where he participated in various plans of the Christian-democratic government of Eduardo Frei, such as the adult education program of the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform ( ICIRA). In Chile she writes Pedagogy of the Oppressed , the content of which displeased the government of Santiago.

Professor at Harvard University, collaborated with groups dedicated to educational reform in rural and urban areas. In 1970 he moved to Geneva (Switzerland), where he worked on the education programs of the World Council of Churches.

After sixteen years of exile, in 1980 he returned to Brazil, teaching at the State University of Campinas and at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, the latter city of which he was Secretary of Education. In 1986, he received the international prize « Peace and Education » from UNESCO. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by about twenty universities around the world.

The context in which Paulo Freire began

As a child, Pablo Freire knew the reality of northeastern Brazil, where until recently people lived in slavery and that at that time the rural classes lived in oppressive labor relations, marginalized from the social, political and economic process and without any participation in the important decisions for the country.

It is there that Paulo Freire enters, trying to get his countrymen to break their passivity and silence, to recognize the strength of their transformative unity, to acquire the critical capacity to relate to society and to free themselves from their ties, the only possibility of society change. He inserts himself into the new revolutionary ideas that existed in Latin America in the 1960s , imbued with the language of liberation that emerged from the most advanced currents of Catholicism, which provoked liberation theology , and using eleElements of the Marxist dialectic for the vision and understanding of history.

« The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and liberating pedagogy, will therefore have two different but interrelated moments. The first, in which the oppressed reveal the world of oppression and commit themselves, in praxis, to its transformation, and the second, in which, once the oppressive reality has been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed. and it becomes the pedagogy of men in the process of permanent liberation »

Freire's most widespread books, traditional pedagogy is characterized in what the author calls banking education ,a paradigm that assumes the educator as the sole holder of knowledge that the student receives passively and uncritically. In this model, the educational act is one-way; a wise educator deposits her knowledge in an ignorant receiver. Banking education is then conceived as the transmission of a reality that does not require re-elaboration and that is presented as the only possible one. As an alternative to this vision, Freire proposes that true education is liberating and is characterized by its reciprocity, presupposes a deep feeling of the value of the other and faith in their ability to forge a destiny.

Among his original methodological proposals for education, Freire develops what he calls the pedagogy of the question . This is based on the creation of knowledge through questions whose exploration ends up reciprocally enriching those involved in the educational act. In this way, the Brazilian author updates Socratic maieutics as a central element of the renewal of contemporary pedagogy.

In the thought of Paulo Freire, the context of Latin American societies and their history necessarily determine a "pedagogy of the oppressed" as the only way for the emancipation of the peoples.

[...] the liberation is a birth. It is a painful birth. The man who is born from it is a new man, a man who is only viable in and by overcoming the oppressor-oppressed contradiction which, ultimately, is the liberation of all.” Fragment of Pedagogy of the oppressed.

OVIDE DECROLY: THE PEDAGOGY OF CENTERS OF INTEREST AND GLOBAL METHODS.

 

(born July 23, 1871, Renaix, Belg.—died Sept. 10, 1932, Brussels), Belgian pioneer in the education of children, including those with physical disabilities. Through his work as a physician, Decroly became involved in a school for disabled children and consequently became interested in education. One outcome of this interest was his establishment in 1901 of the Institute for Abnormal Children in Uccle, Belg. Decroly credited the school’s homelike atmosphere with helping students achieve better and more-consistent educational results than those typically achieved by nonhandicapped students in regular schools. Successes there prompted Decroly to apply his methods to the education of nonhandicapped children, and to this end he opened the École de l’Ermitage in Brussels in 1907.

Viewing the classroom as a workshop, Decroly based his curriculum on an analysis of children’s needs organized within the four categories of food, shelter, defense, and work. One’s needs formed the centre of a year’s study, and, within the framework of their needs, children were encouraged to develop their individual interests. His program became known as the Decroly method.

Progressive education, movement that took form in Europe and the United States during the late 19th century as a reaction to the alleged narrowness and formalism of traditional education. One of its main objectives was to educate the “whole child”—that is, to attend to physical and emotional, as well as intellectual, growth. The school was conceived of as a laboratory in which the child was to take an active part—learning through doing. The theory was that a child learns best by actually performing tasks associated with learning. Creative and manual arts gained importance in the curriculum, and children were encouraged toward experimentation and independent thinking. The classroom, in the view of Progressivism’s most influential theorist, the American philosopher John Dewey, was to be a democracy in microcosm.

special education, speacil education also called special needs education, the education of children who differ socially, mentally, or physically from the average to such an extent that they require modifications of usual school practices. Special education serves children with emotional, behavioral, or cognitive impairments or with intellectual, hearing, vision, speech, or learning disabilities; gifted children with advanced academic abilities; and children with orthopedic or neurological impairments. See also deafness; blindness; speech disorder; mental disorder; gifted child; childhood disease and disorder; learning disabilities.

special education, speacil education also called special needs education, the education of children who differ socially, mentally, or physically from the average to such an extent that they require modifications of usual school practices. Special education serves children with emotional, behavioral, or cognitive impairments or with intellectual, hearing, vision, speech, or learning disabilities; gifted children with advanced academic abilities; and children with orthopedic or neurological impairments. See also deafness; blindness; speech disorder; mental disorder; gifted child; childhood disease and disorder; learning disabilities.