Is Instructional Scaffolding Actually Vygotskian, and Why Should It Matter to Literacy Teachers?

Abstract

AbstractIn this commentary, the author reconceives Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD), particularly its conflation with the notion of instructional scaffolding. The author reviews Vygotsky's description of the ZPD and how it has come to be misinterpreted; summarizes Wood, Bruner, and Ross's introduction of the scaffolding metaphor and how it emerges from a poor translation; and provides a different, more accurate translation of the ZPD as the zone of next development as available in the documentary film The Butterflies of Zagorsk. The author argues that the conflation of scaffolding with the ZPD has produced a trivialization of Vygotsky's greater body of work, which focused on long‐term, socially mediated human development not short‐term learning. The author makes a case for contextualizing Vygotsky's attention to the ZPD (better translated as zone of next development) in a broader reading of his work and its emphasis on how people develop over time rather than through brief pedagogical intervention.