Vygotsky And Creativity

This text presents a Vygotskian perspective on children's and adults' symbolic engagement in play, multi-modal meaning making, and the arts. Psychologists, artists, and educators present research and practice in a variety of learning environments through the lens of Vygotsky's cultural historical theory. The connections between creative expression, learning, teaching, and development are situated in a theoretical framework that emphasizes the social origins of individual development and the arts. The authors share a view of learning as an imaginative process rooted in our common need to communicate and transform individual experience through the cultural lifelines of the arts. This book is suitable for readers or courses in the following areas: art and aesthetics; art education; art therapy; cultural historical activity theory; communication; creativity studies; early childhood education; education; educational perspectives; educational psychology; emotional development; cultural and societal foundations; language, literacy, and sociocultural studies; learning and development; mental health and catharsis; multiliteracies; multimodal meaning making; play; play therapy; psychology; semiotics; social construction of meaning; trauma, resilience, and therapeutic processes and practices; and Vygotskian approaches to psychology.

Recently, a new understanding of creative thought and creative performance has surfaced. It has also attracted the attention of early childhood professional organizations and researchers. Professional organizations have included it in their publications and conferences. While current creativity researchers have initiated a far more sophisticated understanding of young children’s creative thinking, ways to assess creativity, strategies to promote creativity, and research methodologies. The purpose of this volume is to present a wide range of different theories and areas in the study of creativity to help researchers and theorists work toward the development of different perspectives on creativity with young children. It focuses on critical analyses and reviews of the literature on topics related to creativity research, development, theories, and practices. It will serve as a reference for early childhood education researchers, scholars, academics, general educators, teacher educators, teachers, graduate students, and scientists to stimulate further “dialogue” on ways to enhance creativity. The chapters are of high quality and provide scholarly analyses of research studies that capture the full range of approaches to the study of creativity --- behavioral, clinical, cognitive, cross-cultural, developmental, educational, genetic, organizational, psychoanalytic, psychometric, and social. Interdisciplinary research is also included, as is research within specific domains such as art and science, as well as on critical issues (e.g., aesthetics, genius, imagery, imagination, insight, intuition, metaphor, play, problem finding and solving). Thus, it offers critical analyses on reviews of research in a form that are useful to early childhood researchers, scholars, educators, and graduate students. It also places the current research in its historical context. The volume is also of interest to the general readers who are interested in the young children’s creativity. The chapters are authored by established scholars in the field of young children’s creativity.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

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.

Vol. 2 translated and with an introduction by Jane E. Knox and Carol B. Stevens.

The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky’s important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English. The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky’s relevance to modern psychological thought.

What is creativity, and where does it come from? Creativity and Development explores the fascinating connections and tensions between creativity research and developmental psychology, two fields that have largely progressed independently of each other-until now. In this book, scholars influential in both fields explore the emergence of new ideas, and the development of the people and situations that bring them to fruition. The uniquely collaborative nature of Oxford's Counterpoints series allows them to engage in a dialogue, addressing the key issues and potential benefits of exploring the connections between creativity and development. Creativity and Development is based on the observation that both creativity and development are processes that occur in complex systems, in which later stages or changes emerge from the prior state of the system. In the 1970s and 1980s, creativity researchers shifted their focus from personality traits to cognitive and social processes, and the co-authors of this volume are some of the most influential figures in this shift. The central focus on system processes results in three related volume themes: how the outcomes of creativity and development emerge from dynamical processes, the interrelation between individual processes and social processes, and the role of mediating artifacts and domains in developmental and creative processes. The chapters touch on a wide range of important topics, with the authors drawing on their decades of research into creativity and development. Readers will learn about the creativity of children's play, the creative aspects of children's thinking, the creative processes of scientists, the role of education and teaching in creative development, and the role of multiple intelligences in both creativity and development. The final chapter is an important dialogue between the authors, who engage in a roundtable discussion and explore key questions facing contemporary researchers, such as: Does society suppress children's creativity? Are creativity and development specific to an intelligence or a domain? What role do social and cultural contexts play in creativity and development? Creativity and Development presents a powerful argument that both creativity scholars and developmental psychologists will benefit by becoming more familiar with each other's work.

This book draws upon Vygotsky’s idea of perezhivanie, emotions and imagination, and introduces the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration. These concepts are crucial for explaining and understanding children’s development from a cultural-historical perspective. A book which theorises the relations between the social and the individual through a study of a child’s perezhivanie, which analyses emotions more holistically, and advances the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration, is much needed. This book examines the complexity of human development through a comprehensive elaboration of these concepts, allowing for new insights to be put forward. It doesn’t always follow the chronological order of Vygotsky’s publications, as many of his works remained in the family archives until the 1980s, when his Selected Works were first published in Russian. There has long been a need for a contemporary book on the scholarly treatment of perezhevanie, emotions, and subjectivity, and as such this book revisits dominant representations of these concepts and then puts forward new ways of conceptualising and using them in empirical research. The chapters cover a broad range of case studies where the concepts of perezhivanie, emotions and imagination and subjective sense and subjective configuration are used to give new empirical and theoretical insights into the study of human development.

Vygotksy's legacy is an exciting but often confusing fusion of ideas. An Introduction to Vygotksy provides students with an accessible overview of his work combining reprints of key journal and text articles with editorial commentary and suggested further reading. Harry Daniels explores Vygotsky's work against a backdrop of political turmoil in the developing USSR. Major elements include use of the "culture" concept in social development theory and implications for teaching, learning and assessment. Academics and students at all levels will find this an essential key source of information.