The Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky was immersed in theater and the arts through much of his life, collaborating with scholars of the psychology of acting, including Konstantin Stanislavski’s close confidante and long-time editor Liubov Gurevich, on terms and theories expressed in his historically defining text, An Actor’s Work. This article connects linguistic, theoretical, and methodological aspects of Stanislavski’s work with Vygotsky’s quest to develop a new psychology, finding its apogee in the works of his final years, especially after he (...) gained access to an extended draft of Stanislavski’s chapters. As Vygotsky’s theories continue to influence the field of psychology, this article looks to provide a guidepost for refining understanding of Vygotsky’s theories based on archival evidence and a close reading of contemporary translations of Vygotsky’s major works. (shrink)

Despite iterative learning design being increasingly implemented, such approaches are often delineated by well-defined periods of design/implementation. However, second-order cybernetics, which suggests a participatory approach to learning design, involves responsively adapting learning environments to meet students’ needs, treating them as agentic participants in the classroom. In our mixed methods study, we investigate whether such a process can facilitate egalitarian participation and collaborative interactions in a technology-assisted classroom. We use the example of a graduate psychology class of 17 students and suggest (...) that adaptation of live-chat activities by a participant observer on the Reddit social media platform that supplemented the in-person lecture dynamically, using a network analysis and qualitative ethnography as a modelling facility mimicked the ongoing feedback loops of social media platforms, enabling students to use social media with a critical eye, and engage in productive collaboration. Our quantitative results present network graphs for weekly eigen centrality to understand the egalitarian nature of the network, and transitivity to understand the likelihood for collaboration between more than two agents. Our qualitative results elaborate selected Reddit posts, and weekly field notes to explain how redesigning the chat weekly helped augment lecture-based discussion with the instructor and critique of student presentations, spurring egalitarian participation through a space-place dialectic. Students also provided end-semester feedback that was analyzed using inductive coding, to design future courseware. (shrink)

This mixed methods case study employed Vygotsky’s theory to show how peer and teacher contingent support created individualized zones of proximal development for three students with learning differences in a high school makerspace class at a special education institution. Our results expand extant literature by highlighting the intra- and interpsychological potential of makerspace curricula, specifically for students with learning differences. We employ mixed methods analyses of self-reported responses related to emergent problem navigation, a narrative of class fieldnotes, and visuals of (...) whole class projects to describe full class and individual project-based learning activities. Aggregated results from three students showcase stability in design thinking perceptions through the course of weekly whole class design challenges involving TinkerCAD, Homestyler, and material fabrication techniques. A single student example articulates how similar self-reported perceptions were observed in the non-linear development of an individual project for an end-semester Arts Festival. (shrink)