A Potential for an Integrated View of Development and Learning: Galperin's Contribution to Sociocultural Psychology

Abstract

Piotr Galperin was a contemporary of Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev and shared with them many basic assumptions of cultural-historical psychology. However, unlike his colleagues, Galperin's work received much less attention in Western psychology and is often inadequately perceived as an elaboration of concrete instructional techniques, although it encompasses original contributions to fundamental problems of psychology. Galperin's ideas about learning and development resonate with some recent trends in cognitive psychology, in particular, with a significant shift in cognitive psychology from machinelike models to the study of contextualized cognitive strategies. Unlike other theories though, Galperin's approach contains a unique core component-a conceptualization of psychological aspects of human activity, distinct from its physiological, logical, or sociological aspects, as well as an elaborate concept of internalization. This unifying conceptual basis, combined with recent findings in sociocultural research and cognitive science, creates a promise for a much-desired progress toward an integrated psychological view of mental development.