Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

The purpose of this study is to examine the language acquisition approaches whose conceptions of language acquisitions are transferred to learning environments through adjustments made on the basis of application methods. The paper also discussed their similarities and differences. Different approaches to language acquisition in various…

This article describes Children's Museum of Pittsburgh's multi-phase approach to developing professional development (PD) for its maker educators. Researchers engaged maker educator staff in research-practice partnerships at each stage of the process, with the intention of supporting maker educators in developing their practice. Grounded in…

Lev Vygotsky is no doubt one of the leading educational theorists in history. His theories have been used to guide teaching and learning in public school classrooms for over a century. Vygotsky was considered to be one of the most creative psychologists of the twentieth century. This article covers a brief accounting of his birth, life…

This special issue is devoted to the cultural-historical school of thought about mental development based on the work of Lev Vygotsky. The research of Vygotsky addressed the sociocultural basis of higher-level cognitive functions, and ascribed an influential role to human speech and other mediational tools in originating changes in cognition and…

In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation…