Orchestrating a Text Mediational View of Vygotsky in a College Classroom

Instruction can create zones of proximal development. One's interpretation of Vygotsky's ideas, however, would drive qualitatively different instructional strategies. A text mediational view (Wertsch & Bivens, 1992) supports the classroom as a place where the teacher orchestrates joint activities which promote dialogic texts, allowing students to use language as thinking devices to make connections between what they already know and new concepts. This study describes the author' s role in setting up such joint activities during the first few weeks of a year-long education class. An analysis of this video-taped course revealed two patterns in which the dialogic texts took place. The first pattern called 'shared knowledge scaffolding' involved individual student writing and small group discussion about what students already knew about the topic. Sharing similarities and differences in a whole class discussion, the students and teacher developed publicly shared composite theories regarding the topic. These early theories served as initial reference points as students looked for connections to new information generated during on going class activities. This pattern eventually disappeared as the semester progressed, but the resultant expanded knowledge base became "old" or "anchored" knowledge, which students could now use as mental hooks as they engaged in increasingly sophisticated activities involving application of course concepts in new contexts. The author argues that these two patterns, which underlie the joint activities, provided students with the means to achieve enhanced levels of intersubjectivity, thereby enabling students to increasingly assume responsibility for their learning.