|
Searching
for a Literacy without Limits
in the Zone of Proximal Development
an essay
by Mark Willis (1996)
| 1.
A Literacy without Limits |
|
When I look at a written
text, I see it only as a whole field. If there is sufficient contrast
between ink and paper, I can tell that a text is present, but it differentiates
no further. I do not see words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. I
do not begin to extract semantic meaning from the text's individual
semiotic signs. What I see becomes a kind of meta-sign that reminds
me of two inseparable experiences that could represent the "meaning"
in my life: my visual disability and the ongoing process of adapting
to it. For me, a text is a barrier to cross, a problem to be solved.
My visual disability results
from a degenerative retina condition known as Stargard disease. It has
diminished my photopic or focused eyesight gradually over the past twenty-five
years. My remaining sight is mostly scotopic or peripheral. I typically
identify myself as partially blind and partially sighted. I meet the
definition of the label legally blind, but a more useful way to describe
my disability is to say that I am socially blind. My most significant
functional limitations involve the ability to see, decode, and exchange
visual information in social situations. This includes the nonverbal,
gestural communication exchanged among individuals, the traffic signals
and street signs that regulate the pace and efficiency of social life,
and written texts presented in the print media or displayed on computer
screens.
As a child with normal
eyesight, I acquired the traditional literacy skills promoted by public
schooling. I became an insatiable reader, and I already had begun my
career path as a journalist, before the onset of my disability at age
18. After that literacy became increasingly problematic. Limitations
with accessing and using written texts interrupted my college education
and my employment as a writer. During a two-year period when I read
no books at all, I doubted whether I was capable of literacy. Over time,
however, I began to develop new literacy skills and behaviors to meet
my particular needs. This process of making adaptations and negotiating
accommodations has continued throughout my adult life. I refer to it
now as the search for a literacy without limits, and I recognize
it to be the leading edge of my lifelong learning and development.
Although this search is
driven by individual motives, it follows social paths. My experience
of literacy as an adult cuts against the grain of widely held intellectual
assumptions -- that literacy is an individual rather than a social activity,
that reading and logical thinking are mostly silent processes distinctly
different from speech, that written texts exist as autonomous entities
apart from their contexts. A better fit for my experience of literacy
is the broad definition proposed by anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath
(1992): literacy is a social phenomenon embracing the skills necessary
to store and retrieve information in written form. When literacy is
viewed first as a social phenomenon, it follows that disabilities involving
literacy are also social phenomena. The same is true for the adaptations
and accommodations needed to live with such disabilities.
| 2.
The Zone of Proximal Development |
|
The work of Soviet psychologist
Lev Vygotsky (1895-1934) provides a rich theoretical framework for examining
the social context of literacy and disability. Vygotsky was a founder
of Moscow's Institute of Defectology in 1924. Defectology was then the
Soviet appellation for the field known today as special education. The
term probably reflected the Soviet predilection for a scientific approach
to disability rather than any implicit attitude toward disabled people,
according to Vygotsky biographer Alex Kozulin. In the decade following
the Russian Revolution, Kozulin writes, "All forms of deviancy
and disability were viewed primarily in terms of their social consequences
and requirements for the welfare state" (p. 198). Vygotsky's view
was no exception. He stated in 1925, "Blindness or deafness, as
a psychological fact, is not at all a misfortune, but, as a social fact,
it becomes such" (1994b, p. 20). The significant limitations of
a disability resulted not so much from the physical or sensory defect
itself, but from its impact on social relationships and psychological
processes. Instead of correcting the defect, Vygotsky believed that
rehabilitation efforts should try to adjust the disabled child's social
relations to find alternate processes of psychological development.
The scope of Vygotsky's
work was not limited to problems of special education, however. The
psychological theories that he articulated between 1924-34, based on
research with disabled and nondisabled children, sought to explain how
human cognition is shaped by social and cultural forces. The central
tenet of Vygotsky's cognitive theory maintains that all higher mental
processes (language use, voluntary attention, and logical memory, to
name but a few) originate in social relationships. Language use, for
example, begins as communicative speech between a child and parent,
an external activity in a social situation. Only then does a child begin
to use language as inner speech, the internal activity that becomes
the basis of subsequent forms of thinking. The process of mentally reconstructing
shared external activities is internalization. Higher mental processes
can be understood as internalized social relationships.
"The internalization
of socially rooted and historically developed activities," Vygotsky
concluded, "is the distinguishing feature of human psychology,
the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology"
(1978, p. 57). According to Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner, who brought
Vygotsky's Mind in Society to publication in the U.S. in 1978,
Vygotsky was "the first modern psychologist to suggest the mechanisms
by which culture becomes part of each person's nature" (p. 6).
Vygotsky proposed the concept
of the zone of proximal development to explain how a child's learning
and cognitive development evolve together, dynamically, in social situations.
He defined the zone of proximal development as
the distance between the
actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving
and the level of potential development as determined through problem
solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable
peers. (1978, p. 86)
Vygotsky's concept was
a theoretical challenge to the standardized intelligence testing that
began to influence educational policy-making in the 1920s and 1930s.
His research found that children who were assessed at equal levels of
mental development could vary greatly in their ability to learn with
a teacher's guidance. Such children were not the same mental age, he
concluded, and the course of their learning necessarily would be different.
Testing a child's actual developmental level looks backward at mental
functions that already have matured. Assessing a child's zone of proximal
development looks forward at mental functions that are embryonic and
not yet matured. It thus allows a perspective on the child's dynamic
developmental processes that are still forming, in addition to what
already has formed.
According to Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development questioned a
fundamental assumption of classical psychology: "only the independent
activity of children... indicates their level of mental development"
(pp. 87-88). The zone of proximal development also was a direct challenge
to the developmental theory of Vygotsky's contemporary, the Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget. Piaget's theory maintained that a child's ability to think
developed in successive stages that were innate, distinctly different
in their mental functions, and uniform in their sequence and timing.
Educational programs based on Piaget's theory assumed that learning
activities should match and not exceed the child's level of actual mental
development.
Vygotsky believed that
learning was ineffective when it was oriented exclusively toward developmental
levels that had already been achieved. Instead, learning activities
should push the learner toward potential developmental levels. The education
of mentally retarded children, for example, was based on "concrete,
look-and-do" learning activities because they had limited abilities
for abstract thinking. Vygotsky believed that such methods reinforced
the children's disability. "Precisely because retarded children,
when left to themselves, will never achieve well-elaborated forms of
abstract thinking," he wrote, "the school should make every
effort to push them in that direction and develop in them what is intrinsically
lacking in their own development" (1978, p. 89).
In Vygotsky's original
formulation, the zone of proximal development enabled interaction between
the "scientific" or systematic concepts of an adult and the
"everyday" or spontaneous concepts of a child. As an educational
tool, interaction in the zone is structured by a teacher to guide the
child's participation in a shared activity until the child can perform
the activity independently. Kozulin operationalizes the concept thus,
"The educator diagnoses the depth of the zone and constructs a
sequence of activities with the gradually diminishing contribution of
an adult and the growing contribution of the ... child" (p. 202).
Effective learning drives
actual mental development, according to Vygotsky, and it does so by
creating zones of proximal development. "(L)earning awakens a variety
of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when
the child is interacting with people in his [or her] environment and
in cooperation with his [or her] peers," he concluded. "Once
these processes are internalized, they become part of the child's independent
developmental achievement" (1978, p. 90).
When Vygotsky first formulated
his theory of internalization, he noted that only "the barest outline
of this process is known" (1978, p. 57). His work began to attract
the attention of Western psychologists and educators only in the 1970s.
According to Kozulin, investigators in the West have expanded the concept
of the zone of proximal development, shifting from Vygotsky's original
emphasis on the interaction of systematic and spontaneous thinking to
examine other "dialogical, intersubjective" aspects of learning
in social environments (p. 170). Vygotsky's theories are most widely
applied today to issues of child development and learning in formal
educational settings. I believe Vygotsky's ideas also can illuminate
the social processes that adults follow as they adapt to disabilities.
To illustrate my point, I will retrace one path I followed in my search
for a literacy without limits.
| 3.
Developing a Second Literacy |
|
As I lost the ability to
read printed texts, I actively sought new information through experiences
that were rich in oral discourse. In addition to social conversation
with all types of people, I attended lectures, meetings, poetry readings,
plays, and movies. I listened avidly to public radio. Occasionally other
people read texts orally to me. I realize now that these experiences
were precursors for developing a literacy based on listening to texts
rather than seeing them. Perhaps the most important precursor was my
growing awareness that, if I wanted to acquire new knowledge, I had
to actively seek social interactions that provided diverse opportunities
for dialogue. I think many of these dialogical experiences functioned
as zones of proximal development, albeit informal or tacit ones.
My second literacy blossomed
when I began to read "talking" books, the popular name for
oral/aural texts recorded in several sound reproduction media. I can
trace this transformation to a particular social interaction with one
of my most influential mentors, my sister Diana. She is 13 years older
than I, and she also has a visual disability. Diana has more focused
and less peripheral eyesight than I have. Her limited vision began as
a young child and presented problems throughout her public school education.
Our parents and school officials recognized that she had a problem,
and vision testing became a frequent, frustrating, and inconclusive
experience for her. The tests did not lead to a medical diagnosis, treatment,
corrective eyeglasses, or classroom accommodations. When she graduated
from high school in 1960, a guidance counselor told her that she should
"just be a housewife" because she could never get through
college. Despite that advice, perhaps in spite of it, she completed
a bachelor's degree in four years at Ohio State University and became
a first-grade school teacher.
Diana's retina disease
was not diagnosed until mine was in 1973. At that time she was age 31,
and her diagnosis was retinitis pigmentosa. Eight years later I travelled
to Memphis, where she lived, so that a retina specialist there could
examine us both at the same time. Although our fields of vision differ
significantly in configuration, he concluded that we had to have the
same genetically determined condition. Diana's diagnosis was changed
to Stargard disease.
During the same visit to
Memphis, Diana showed me a talking book cassette player loaned to her
by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
(NLS), a division of the Library of Congress. At her prodding, I sat
down and listened to the book she was reading then, Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina. We listened together for a time, then I plugged a cheap
wire earphone into the machine. For the first time in years, I had the
sensation of private, solitary reading. The cassette player was bulkier
than a book, but it was portable. I could carry it from room to room
or walk outside to read in the garden. By the end of my visit I was
hooked on this new way of reading. Diana sent me home with a spare cassette
player that she somehow had finagled from the NLS, and I called the
NLS regional library the next day to borrow my own talking books.
This was not my first exposure
to talking books, however. Several years after the onset of my disability
a rehabilitation counselor had given me an NLS disk player. Before the
NLS developed cassette books, talking books were recorded on thick celluloid
disks that resembled 78 rpm phonograph records. They played at 16.5
rpm, a much slower speed that enabled about an hour and forty minutes
of audio text per record side. A typical book required four to six records.
The disk player was not portable and could not be used with an earphone.
Reading with it was not a private or moveable feast.
The disk player gathered
dust in my house. Every two or three months the NLS sent me sample books
that I did not want to read. The automatic distribution program was
intended to introduce new talking book readers to the library's offerings.
My impression of the NLS catalog then was that it offered little more
than the Living Bible, Louis L'Amour westerns, and inspirational self-help
books. There seemed to be little that could interest a twenty-something
writer who was losing his eyesight and struggling to maintain a once
boundless literacy.
As often as not I misplaced
the unread books and failed to return them to the NLS. I became what
librarians for the blind call a "hoarder," a borrower who
must be nagged, cajoled, or threatened to return talking books. I also
qualified for a malaise that rehabilitation counselors call the "dresser
drawer" syndrome. This occurs when disabled people neglect to use
the adaptive devices given to them by rehabilitation programs. This
behavior is sometimes explained as the disabled person's denial of the
need to adapt or resistance to the rehabilitation efforts of others.
Hoarding and the dresser drawer syndrome are common enough phenomena
to acquire bureaucratic labels, but little attention has been paid to
the behaviors that may motivate them.
So what made the difference
when I began to read my sister's copy of Anna Karenina? The change
in technology from disks to cassettes was part of it. So was the discovery
of a recorded book that I really wanted to read. Both factors eased
the transition from print to oral/aural literacy. Cassette technology
enabled me to read by myself whenever and wherever I chose to do so
-- familiar reading behaviors from print literacy. The novel, recorded
by a mellifluous professional narrator, was an appealing and easily
readable introduction to audio texts. I could read it with the same
speed and attentiveness that one reads a "page-turner" at
the beach. By comparison the audio editions of Vygotsky's Thought
and Language or Mind in Society would have been discouraging
introductions to a new literacy. Oral/aural reading of technical, expository
texts can be slow going, requiring close concentration and frequent
pauses and rewinding of audio tape.
More significant than reading
technology or content, though, was the social context in which this
transformation occurred. From the perspective of Vygotsky's theory,
the context created a zone of proximal development in which I could
participate in a new literacy activity with a more skilled and influential
peer. Reading Diana's talking book began as a shared external activity.
Then I internalized it as an individual behavior, at first adapting
it to familiar behaviors already internalized from print literacy. The
development of my second literacy began in this zone of social interaction,
but it was not completed there. After 15 years of reading this way,
I know that developing the social and cognitive skills necessary for
oral/aural literacy has been an ongoing process that has unfolded through
many other social contexts.
The zone of proximal development
described here differs in two important ways from Vygotsky's original
formulation. It involved an adult-adult rather than an adult-child interaction.
Although one of the adults was more skilled in oral/aural literacy than
the other, the interaction was not planned structured to achieve an
explicit learning goal. Nonetheless, the zone created an environment
with dialogical interaction and intersubjectivity where learning could
take place. According to psychologist James Wertsch, participants in
a zone of proximal development -- indeed, in any dialogical situation
-- must agree at some level about the definition of objects and tasks
in the situation. The negotiation of meaning (situation definition)
by the participants establishes their intersubjectivity, a temporarily
shared social reality (Wertsch, 1985, pp. 156-66).
Diana and I share a durable
social reality. Its intersubjectivity includes a longstanding sibling
relationship, a genetic retina disease, and a similar visual disability.
She is the closest person in my social world who experiences literacy
in the same ways I do. The strongest intersubjective element in our
zone of proximal development, although it was not acknowledged explicitly
at the time, may have been our shared motive. Our first literacies were
valuable to us, and our disability presented a shared problem which
we had to solve to gain a second literacy. A teacher or rehabilitation
counselor could have told me about talking books in a prescriptive way,
but could not have shared the same motive to solve a mutual problem.
Vygotsky's attention turned
to motive near the end of his life, but he did not live to explore its
implications fully. In the concluding chapter of Thought and Language,
he traced the process of internalization through several functional
planes, beginning with external speech (communicative speech shared
with others) and moving inward to inner speech (thinking for one's self).
Vygotsky considered motive to be the inward-most function in the process.
His discussion of motive does not limit it to a purely internal function,
however. Its function is inextricably linked to problem-solving on the
external, social plane. Vygotsky wrote that "every thought creates
a connection, fulfills a function, solves a problem" (1994a, p.
249). In Vygotsky's model, motive is not the final result of the process
by which language is transformed into thought; motive is the source
that drives the process. "Thought is not begotten by thought,"
he wrote, "it is engendered by motivation, i.e., by our desires
and needs, our interests and emotions" (1994a, p. 252).
When I apply Vygotsky's
ideas to my own experiences with literacy and disability, I find that
a possible outcome of a zone of proximal development could be the renewal
of motive. My sister and I have "talked" talking books ever
since we first listened to Anna Karenina together. Our shared
experiences with oral/aural literacy has deepened our understanding
and use of it. Our shared motive to solve literacy problems has sustained
the search for solutions until literacy itself was transformed. We make
up a learning community of two in our particular, intersubjective way.
We have created zones of proximal development for one another throughout
our adult lives as we continue to adapt and live with our disability.
My fitful, uneven progress
toward new ways of reading underscores a final point about oral/aural
literacy. This literacy is not simply a shift in sensory perception
(from vision to hearing) or information technology (from print to audio
texts). Reading an audio text, no matter how carefully it is recorded,
is not the same as reading a printed text. Oral/aural reading involves
complex cognitive processes (Vygotsky's higher mental functions). I
think the development of these processes requires transformations, rather
than simple extensions, of processes involved in speech events and recognition
of visual signs. Developing the skills necessary for a different type
of literacy is not innate, and it is not guaranteed by the availability
of adaptive technology. An adaptive device, crucial as it may be, is
only a tool in the larger social process of adaptation.
From a Vygotskian perspective,
developing a different type of literacy requires the internalization
of socially rooted and historically developed activities -- activities
that are shaped and transmitted by culture. I believe the internalization
of oral/aural literacy is as complex and richly varied in possibilities
as the internalization of print literacy. The cognitive and social processes
involved in oral/aural literacy have not yet been studied in any detail
from the perspective of psycholinguistics, ethnography, or education.
Although an oral/aural text represents a barrier that has been crossed,
it continues to present problems to be solved. In my experience, those
problems represent the developmental potential for literacy and learning.
| Works
Cited |
1
| 2 | 3 | 4
| 5 | Works Cited | 
|
Cole,
Michael & Scribner, Sylvia. (1978). Introduction to L. Vygotsky,
Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (pp.
1-14). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Heath, Shirley Brice. (1992).
Literacy: An overview. In W. Bright (Ed.), The International encyclopedia
of linguistics (Vol. 2, pp. 337-340). New York: Oxford University Press.
Kozulin, Alex. (1990).
Vygotsky's psychology: A biography of ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Tolstoy, Leo. (1965). Anna
Karenina. Narrated by Guy Sorel. New York: Modern Library (Audio text
RC 12563. Washington, D.C.: National Library Service for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped).
Vygotsky, Lev. (1978).
Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Edited by Michael Cole, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, Lev. (1994a).
Thought and language. Translated, newly revised, and edited by Alex
Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Vygotsky, Lev. (1994b).
Principles of social education for deaf and dumb children in Russia.
In R. van der Veer and J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Vygotsky Reader (pp.
19-26). Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Wertsch, James V. (1985).
Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
|