scaffolding

Description
Vygotsky, one of Piaget's contemporaries sought to study dialogue in learning, stating that “the most effective learning occurs when the adult draws the child out to the jointly constructed ‘potential’ level of performance". Based on his belief in dialogics, Vygotsky proposed the notion of "scaffolding", the process through which adults or "teachers" construct an environment through which learners can thrive and develop their understanding through autonomous meaning-making growth.

Cambourne (1988), on the other hand, places less emphasis on modeling and more on the constructive nature of learning. He describes scaffolding as “raising the ante” and he fleshes out what he sees as the most common attributes in a conversation helpful to learning: (1) focusing on a learner’s conception; (2) extending or challenging the conception; (3) refocusing by encouraging clarification; and (4) redirecting by offering new possibilities for consideration.

Is an assumption being made that a learner can “absorb” the adult’s conceptual understanding if the developmental match is right—that meaning resides in the symbolic representation of the teacher and that it can be “transmitted” to a learner? These assumptions are not based on the new paradigm, but instead are a residue of the old. They are still grounded in an empiricist theory of learning and are based on a belief that we hold identical objective meanings about a world we are discovering, rather than constructing.

The same point can be made about the notion of scaffolding in an educational setting. Is there a “truth” that the scaffolding process leads to? Whose truth is it?

Quotes
Vygotsky repeated many of Piaget’s early experiments on language and concluded instead that speech was social right from the start. He proposed that “egocentric speech” was actually the beginning of the formation of the inner speech that would be used later as a tool in thinking. (Fosnot. C, p. 22)