Social Leaning Interview

Details
Your weekly assignment is a bit different. As we are discussing social learning, your assignment has a social element. You will interview a friend or family member about their heroes and role models. Develop some questions, such as,
Who do you admire? Why?
Who are your role models?
What qualities do you think of when you call someone a hero?
Summarize the interview and reflect on what the person you selected said. Consider your ideas through the lens of learning. What do you now know about the role of culture and the social nature of learning?
The grade evaluation is a checklist this week to free you to conduct the sort of interview you and the person you select is most comfortable with.
M6 Assignment Checklist
Learning Content
There are multiple theories that rightfully belong in this section, however, because of our obvious time constraints our focus will be on Lev Vygotskii.
This theorist grew up in an arts and culture oriented family so it is with little surprise that his ideas about learning are known as the Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development. He was an educator and very interested in the role of play and discovery in the learning process. He suggested that our learning is dynamic, a shift from more traditional ideas about stages and other explanations. The tools and artifacts of our social, familial, and cultural environment are what influence our thought process and our learning, he said, and, most especially, language. Vygotskii came to prominence during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Bolsheviks liked his ideas about the role of culture and class is shaping our learning. However, Stalin came to power and he did not want Russian scholars to communicate freely with scientists in the West. Vygotskii’s push to know more and interact with Western psychologists and educators landed him in hot water with Russian leadership. Eventually he was sent to a work at a reeducation camp and, unfortunately due to poor health (tuberculosis) he died at age 34.
Vygotskii’s biggest contributions to education were in the ideas of social learning. As mentioned earlier, Vygotskii stood in opposition to a static or individualistic view of learning. He believed that children learned from the teacher, parents, family members, and peers. He indicated that we learned from these interactions and gained knowledge and understanding through collaboration and cooperative experiences. The learning process was marked, according to Vygotskii, by multiple zones, the most well-known, The Zone of Proximal Development. Children come into any situation with existing knowledge and skills. In schools, the job of the teacher is to take where the student comes in and move via steps of incremental instruction to a new level of knowledge or skill that the student has now mastered and can complete unaided. Those of you who played a sport were probably taught some aspect of the game, such as pitching, with successive approximations and a lot of practice and feedback until finally mastering the finer points of throwing a strike. Ultimately, Vygotskii said all children, due to their unique set of circumstances, their environments, and diverse knowledge should have an individualized education plan.
Side Note: Lev Vygotskii and his name are appropriately embedded in a cultural context. As there were few psychologists that could read and write Russian, it took awhile for Westerners to have access to his work. Also, in that time, translations for the Cyrillic alphabet went through many revisions. Vygotskii in the Cyrillic alphabet is spelled Выго́тский. The last two characters have been translated variously as y, i, and ii. As you can see the material selected for reading uses y but our understanding of the best translation is ii, which has been selected in the learning material description.
Required Readings
Lev Vygotskii
(Links to an external site.)
On Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding:https://www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html

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