This book provides both a lost last word and a firm first foundation: seven lectures, given in the last months in the life of the Soviet thinker, teacher, and writer L.S. Vygotsky, offer us the most comprehensive and developed form of his thoughts on the child, expressed in the most fundamental and even popular form that Vygotsky himself used with his beginner-level students. As the title of Vygotsky’s course indicates, these are foundations upon which cultural-historical researchers can rebuild the lost science of “pedology”, a holistic approach to child development based on the dynamic unity of physical and mental development. Volume One includes translations of seven of Vygotsky’s lectures that reflect his approach to pedology; the method of pedology and the “methodics” of the unit of analysis; the role of heredity and social environment in child development; and general laws of development in childhood that will help parents and teachers understand the way the child’s endocrine system, nervous system, and mind change as the child enters a culture and learns to make history.

vi the text can engender. Of course, translations by scholars of advanced standing are not a novelty in modern scholarship. The Plenum translations ofVygotsky' s texts are appearing at a moment when authentic and authoritative English versions of them are rare-a moment when the frequency of works about Vygotsky threatens to outstrip the availability of work by Vygotsky. Since seminal thinkers make their contributions by provoking further thought, admirers ofVygotsky will, of course, welcome the spate of interpretation, reinterpretation, revision, reconstruction, and deconstruction which Vygotsky's work has invited and will participate with alacrity in the activity. Yet, the translations appearing in these volumes are not offered as interpretations in the sense that they are new analytic works about Vygotsky. They are offered to serve as basic texts for readers of English who may be interested in what Vygotsky himself had to say. They are offered to scholars and students, who will make their own interpretations (in its broader sense) and who will evaluate the interpretations of others. Having taken the view that a good translation is essentially an interpretation, the claim that this volume is an accurate and authentic interpretation of Vygotsky's meanings and intentions-and only of those meanings and intentions-must await hoped-for reassurances from those reviewers and critics who are qualified to make such judgments.

This book contains the first complete translation of the first half of the Pedology of the Adolescent by the Soviet thinker, educator, and teacher L.S. Vygotsky. It was the longest work published in his lifetime and was a correspondence course written by Vygotsky for teachers across the Soviet Union. The book is a sustained argument about the borders of pedology, the nature of the transition between childhood and adulthood, and the concrete character of the distinction between the lower psychological functions that we largely share with animals and those that are specific to fully socialized humans. After an initial methodological introduction, three kinds of maturation—general anatomical, sexual, and sociocultural—are explored. This book will be followed by a companion volume covering pedology of the transitional age as a psychological and social problem.

This book is the second volume in a series presenting new English translations of L.S. Vygotsky’s writings on the holistic science of the child he called “pedology”. It presents unique materials which reflect the development of Vygotsky’s theoretical position at the last stage of his creative evolution in 1932-1934 and contributes to the number of original Vygotsky texts available in English. It includes the problem of age and age periodization; the structure and dynamics of age, psychological characteristics of age crises and diagnostics of development in relation to age, and the zone of proximal development, which became his most widely known but least understood theoretical innovation. This book places that concept in its context and makes it fully understandable for the first time. In addition, there are lectures and notes that Vygotsky made in preparation for lectures on six critical periods: birth, one year old, three, seven, and thirteen. Vygotsky also devotes chapters to the stable periods of infancy and early childhood and two whole chapters to school age. Future volumes in this series will explore Vygotsky’s pedology of the adolescent.

The Vygotsky Anthology brings together, for the first time, a selection of extracts from the best translations available of Vygotsky’s writings, spanning the entire arc of his career. Vygotsky was arguably one of the greatest educational psychologists of the 20th century. Grounded in his experience as a teacher, an expert in special education, a research psychologist and an outstanding theorist, the editors of this unique anthology chart his enormous influence on professionals working in education and child development around the world. The extracts are introduced by the editors’ commentaries, helpfully setting them in the context of Vygotsky’s life and work, providing a collection of work that adequately represents his writing, and conveying some of the great pleasures of reading him. In the passages selected here, his voice is clearly heard, the intellectual brilliance of his insights is reflected, his line of argument is clear, and his humour and humanity are evident. With its inclusion of recent translations of essential texts, this anthology will help students to understand the full diversity of Vygotsky’s influence on today’s classrooms. Seen as a companion volume to Myra Barrs’ previous work Vygotsky the Teacher (Routledge, 2022), the value of this text to teachers, educational psychologists, and other practitioners working in the field of education and child development will be significant and lasting. It is a key reference book for new generations of Vygotsky students.

This book utilizes cultural psychology as a cultural theory and psychological theory capable of explaining and improving social issues. In particular Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology, and Ratner’s macro-cultural psychology are invoked to explain racism and mitigate it. This explanation of, and solution to, racism are utilized as a framework for analyzing and refining contemporary movements for racial justice. Among the topics discussed: Macro cultural psychology and Vygotsky’s Marxist cultural-historical psychology Differentiating psychological racism from economic racism Historical examples of racism during American slavery which reveal their cultural and psychological features Cultural-psychological analysis and refinement of Black Lives Matter, racial capitalism, intersectionism, and Ta-Nehishi Coates’ work Cultural Psychology, Racism, and Social Justice will be of interest to the fields of social policy, social transformation, psychological theory, cultural theory, and history.

Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies brings together recent critical investigations which examine historical and textual inaccuracies associated with received understandings of Vygotsky’s work. By deconstructing the Vygotskian narrative, the authors debunk the 'cult of Vygotsky', allowing for a new, exciting interpretation of the logic and direction of his theory. The chapters cover a number of important themes, including: The chronology of Vygotsky’s ideas and theory development, and the main core of his theoretical writings Relationships between Vygotskians and their Western colleagues The international reception of Vygotskian psychology and problems of translation The future development of Vygotskian science Using Vygotsky’s published and unpublished writings the authors present a detailed historical understanding of Vygotsky’s thought, and the circumstances in which he worked. It includes coverage of the organization of academic psychology in the Soviet Union, the network of scholars associated with Vygotsky in the interwar period, and the assumed publication ban on Vygotsky’s writings. This volume is the first to provide an overview of revisionist studies of Vygotsky’s work, and is the product of close international collaboration between revisionist scholars. It will be an essential contribution to Vygotskian scholarship, and of great interest to researchers in the history of psychology, history of science, Soviet/Russian history, philosophical psychology and philosophy of science.

This highly accessible guide to the varied aspects of Vygotsky’s psychology emphasises his abiding interest in education. Vygotsky was a teacher, a researcher and educational psychologist who worked in special needs education, and his interest in pedagogy was fundamental to all his work. Vygotsky the Teacher analyses and discusses the full range of his ideas and their far-reaching educational implications. Drawing on new work, research and fresh translations, this unique text foregrounds key Vygotskian perspectives on play, imagination and creativity, poetry, literature and drama, the emotions, and the role of language in the development of thought. It explains the textual issues surrounding Vygotsky’s publications that have, until recently, obscured some of the theoretical links between his ideas. It underlines Vygotsky’s determination to create a psychology that is capable of explaining all aspects of the development of mind. Vygotsky the Teacher is essential reading for students on education and psychology courses at all levels, and for all practitioners wanting to know more about Vygotsky’s theories and their roots in research and practice. It offers a unique road map of his work, connecting its different aspects, and placing them in the context of his life and the times in which he lived.

William Stern was an important German psychologist. What remains rather preserved from his scientific heritage is centered around the notion of intelligence and differential psychology. Yet, Stern’s scientific work is more complex than that. For instance, William Stern has laid the groundwork for a philosophical system – called critical personology – being a groundwork for the psychological sciences in general. This book tries to restore and expand Stern’s philosophical ideas of critical personology while showing pathways how to apply this expansion to applied fields of psychology such as career counselling, psychological mediation, psychotherapy, personnel selection among many other domains of psychology. With the present book, critical personology can become a theoretical, methodological and interventional tool with which psychologists of various disciplines might work in their related fields. As such, the book will be rewarding for multiple audiences. First, scholars of the history of psychology might use the insights of the book in order to acknowledge Stern’s forgotten theories such as about Stern’s notion of the unconscious. Second, psychologists being interested in a wholistic approach towards psychology will gain useful knowledge and tools how to better understand the complexity and dynamic of the person (especially the person’s needs, drives, motives and so forth). Third, applied psychologists can use the various frameworks in order to diversify their methodological and interventional knowledge and help people to better understand themselves as well as to adjust to their environments.