Vygotsky’s Contribution to English Language Arts Pedagogy in the Postwar United Kingdom

• In Event: Beyond the Zone of Proximal Development: Vygotsky and English Language Arts and Drama Pedagogy

Abstract

Vygotsky’s contribution to English pedagogy has long been recognized. However the historical circumstances in which the Soviet psychologist’s ideas were introduced in the West remains a subject for debate. This is of more than historical interest because it has shaped ways in which Vygotsky has been read as well as ways in which the significance of his legacy is perceived and applied. James Britton (1970, 1987) was one of the first educationists in the UK to appreciate the theoretical power of Vygotsky’s ideas about the relationship between learning and development, the role of inner speech in developing children’s intellectual powers and the place of the evolution of word meanings in the formation of scientific concepts. But when did Vygotsky’s work first register in Britton’s thinking? Drawing on two surviving manuscripts from Britton’s papers, recently deposited in the Institute of Education, London University Archives, in which he refers to lectures going back to 1949, I will show how Britton read Vygotsky from the perspectives of a progressive tradition that aimed to reform the teaching of English in the post-war period. As far as Russian and Soviet sources go, he mentions Pavlov as well as the work of Alexander Luria, but Vygotsky is not mentioned until 1962, the year in which Thought and Language was published in translation. Further to this, I will show how Soviet psychology was introduced into British educational discourse somewhat earlier in connection with a radical critique of intelligence testing and selective schooling by two educational historians, Brian and Joan Simon. Drawing on documents presently deposited in the Institute of Education Archives, I will describe how Brian Simon made a number of visits to the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Educational Sciences, where he met Luria and Leontiev, influential researchers, who had known and worked with Vygotsky personally in the twenties and thirties. Vygotsky is mentioned as a seminal figure by Luria in a chapter included in the book that Simon edited after the Soviet visit, Psychology in the Soviet Union (1957). Simon drew on Soviet psychology in his submission to the Plowden Report (DES 1967); Britton drew on Vygotsky for his contribution to the Bullock Report (DES 1975). My overall aim is to bring out certain unresolved tensions that have shaped contrasting ways in which Vygotsky’s ideas have been taken up in the intervening years, especially in the context of the development of pedagogical theory in the UK .

Author

• John Hardcastle, University of London