Adult and Child Development in the Zone of Proximal Development: Socratic Dialogue in a Playworld

Abstract

This article analyses adult and child development in the zone of proximal development in an educational practice based in Vygotsky's theories of play: the playworld educational practice. The playworld educational practice is a central component of a Scandinavian play pedagogy that promotes shared responsibility amongst adults and children for engaging in adult–child joint play. The playworld practice, which is based on a work of children's literature, includes joint adult–child scripted and improvisational acting and set design. We explore conditions under which playworld activities create a zone of proximal development that fosters development in both adult and child. Our analysis, based on data from a K-1 classroom, expands Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development so that we see not only the unidirectional development of a child toward an adult stage of development but also the simultaneous development experienced by adults participating in the zone with the child.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.