Introduction

L. S. Vygotsky’s theoretical and empirical works, conducted at the intersections of the fields of psychology and education in the first decades of the 20th century, consist of a genuine attempt to study human development in movement, in its inherent process of historical constitution and (trans)formation. Vygotsky conceived the individual’s cultural development as a personal history intrinsically woven in to cultural practices and human history. One of the persistent issues that pervaded his works comprised ways of inquiring and investigating the emergence of new possibilities and forms of human action, at the interweaving of ontogenesis, culture, and history.

Throughout his investigative work, as he approached a diversity of themes related to human conduct and consciousness, Vygotsky elaborated many methodological and analytical procedures. He consistently argued about the intrinsic relations between the research method and the problem under inquiry, strongly defending the need to search for a method adequate to the possible configurations of an object of investigation.

In order to give visibility to the engendering of new forms of action and mental functioning, he proposed what he called the instrumental, double stimulation, or historical-genetic method, and argued about the importance of developing experimental designs related to teaching and pedagogical work. Indeed, one of his major concerns had to do with the ways of teaching and the ways of studying teaching relations, as well as the results or effects of such relations.

The issue of method is at the core of Vygotsky’s proposal. His entire work is pervaded by a methodological inquiry. As we approach his studies of human development, we highlight their historical and dialectical foundations and emphasize the ethical-political dimension of knowledge production as well as the social commitment inscribed in the very act of researching. Through this prism, to raise the issues and to pose the questions in educational research is already an expression of social commitment, as is designing and conducting a study provoking development and change.

Particularly in the field of education, this theoretical-methodological perspective becomes fruitful in support of research work that links the general problem of human development to cultural, political, and educational practices, opening new possibilities of human activity and praxis. It becomes possible to contribute to the investigation on human development and social life as we actually work on (trans)formative educational practices.

In the present article, our objectives are as follows: (1) to contextualize the work of the author in the historical and cultural ambience of his time; (2) to make explicit his main concerns and the basic assumptions that orient his search for the understanding of human development; (3) to discuss his conception of investigative activity and the elaboration of research method in the fields of psychology and education; (4) to explore the implications of his approach to contemporary research in education.

Vygotsky and the Historical-Cultural Ambience of His Time

The ideas of Lev Semienovitch Vygotsky, elaborated in the first decades of the 20th century, have been widely disseminated, especially since the early 1980s, and have been gaining adherents throughout the world, impacting the ways of doing research in the field of education.

All biographies of Vygotsky mention the extension of his work in relation to the shortness of his life. Born in Belarus, in 1896, the second child of a Jewish family, Vygotsky died early, at the age of 37, and left a set of inspiring ideas as he worked at the intersections of various areas of knowledge, such as language arts and literature, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, medical studies, neurology.

Immersed in a rich cultural ambience, Vygotsky lived the first decades of the 20th century in the midst of an enormous effervescence of ideas. Impacted by the demands and proposals of the Russian Revolution, he felt the contradictions of social relations and conditions of production deeply. It was a period of industrialization and modernization of means of production, pari passu with intense arts and science production. Profound differences between urban and agrarian life conditions became quite visible and accentuated. He became extremely aware of the profound social inequalities, and also experienced discrimination due to his Jewish roots. Sharing the revolutionary ideal of an emergent engaged youth, he adhered to the utopia of the construction of the “new man.”

Working as a professor of literature and acting as a critic of arts in the small city of Gomel, he became a famous psychologist and researcher on human development, genuinely concerned with and committed to the educational process.

Attentive to the problems and controversies of his time, he approached and became acquainted with different fields of knowledge, examining and debating the most diverse issues: the forms and functions of language; literary creation and poetic function; the aesthetic reaction; evolution and revolution; heredity and environment; consciousness and behavior; history and development; idealism and materialism; the status of science; social transformations; among others.

Passionate about literature and art, he was 19 when he wrote the first version of his study on Hamlet’s Tragedy (Vygotsky, 1999), which he would later revisit and revise, to integrate his doctoral work on Psychology of Art (Vygotsky, 1971). At this same time, he wrote about teaching and school education in a collection of texts that composed the Educational Psychology (Vygotsky, 1997b).¹

Hamlet’s tragedy, for him, synthesizes human drama. It is this drama, experienced in the social and subjective dimension, that is interwoven in the concrete conditions of Vygotsky’s life. Beyond living through the German occupation in Russia, during which two of his brothers died, Vygotsky assumed the care of his mother and another brother with tuberculosis, who also later passed away.

The young reader of Hamlet also contracted tuberculosis. The awareness of the imminence of death gave rise to a tragic feeling. To live under the imminence of death, in a revolutionary era, made some life projects urgent and unavoidable.

The last ten years of his life—1924 to 1934—saw a concentration of Vygotsky’s intense production. The literary critic, who became a teacher, also became an investigator of human drama. With A. Luria and A. Leontiev, his closest working companions, Vygotsky composed a research group at Moscow University, which was referred to as “troika” in Russian psychology.

Holding the position of head of a defectology laboratory, created in 1925 to work with children with diverse pathologies and atypical development, Vygotsky defended and proposed many ways of pedagogically working while researching human development, inquiring also about the conditions and the possibilities of human creative activity.

Literature and art, pedagogy (orientations and modes of teaching) and pedology (the science of child development), psychology (the study of human development and consciousness in history and culture), and defectology all become articulated in Vygotsky’s field of interest and investigation.

The notion of drama, initially anchored in Shakespeare’s work, became re-dimensioned in Vygotsky’s studies and dialogue with many other authors’ contributions: Hegel’s dialectics; Janet’s notion of internalized socius; Spinoza’s monism and his idea of affectum; Aristotle’s and Freud’s distinct notions of catharsis; Darwin’s theory of evolution; Pavlov’s works on reflexes and the nervous system; Gestalt’s studies on perception; Lewin’s field theory; the drama of everyday life in Politzer; and, more strongly, Marx’s philosophy and dialectical historical materialism.

In this search and inquiry movement, the notion of drama acquired a new status: it was conceived as a mode of organization and functioning of the human psyche, a characteristic of the historically elaborated consciousness. At the heart of this dramatic consciousness, Vygotsky stressed the verbal form of language which, as a historical formation, not only enabled shared symbolic work “beyond the skin,” but enabled each human being to experience in the private sphere the functions, tensions, and contradictions of social relationships.

The experience of this drama at the personal level and the awareness of this drama at the historical level led Vygotsky to reflect on the inevitable determinism of the material world in relation to the historical determinations resulting from human activity in this world and the possibilities of construction of will, or determination, in the individual sphere. His life and work ended up evidencing his thesis: the social constitution of the individual personality and the conditions of possibilities of protagonism of the subject, forged in the history of social relations.

The Problem of Consciousness and the Quest for a Concrete Psychology

In order to understand Vygotsky’s methodological proposal and the status of method in his theoretical position it is essential to become acquainted with the main concerns and the basic assumptions that orient his search and inquiry concerning human development. Excerpts from his earlier texts can give us a glimpse of his preoccupations and the continuous efforts that mark the history of his untiring work:

We have to speak openly. The enigmas of consciousness, the enigmas of the mind cannot be avoided with any methodological tricks or subterfuges of principle.

Consciousness is the experience of experiences [. . .] Being determines consciousness.

What can be searched for in the masters of Marxism beforehand is not a solution of the question, not even a working hypothesis [. . .] but the method to develop it. I do not want to learn what constitutes the mind for free, by picking out a couple of citations, I want to learn from Marx’s whole method how to build a science, how to approach the investigation of the mind.

N.B.: The word history (historical psychology) for me means two things: (1) a general dialectical approach to things—in this sense, everything has its history; this is what Marx meant: the only science is history (Archives. P. X); natural science = the history of nature, natural history; (2) history in the strict sense, that is, human history. The first history is dialectic; the second is historical materialism. In contrast to lower functions, the development of higher functions is governed by historical laws (see the character of the Greeks and our character). The uniqueness of the human mind lies in the fact that both types of history (evolution + history) are united (synthesis) in it. The same is true in child psychology.

(Vygotsky, 1994a, p. 41)(Vygotsky, 1997a, pp. 71, 76)(Vygotsky, 1997c, p. 331)(Vygotsky, 1986, pp. 54–55)

The set of the citations can be taken as indicative of the author’s search for what he calls a general, scientific, human, concrete psychology (Vygotsky, 1986, 1997c). Through the reading of these texts, we can trace Vygotsky’s analyses and questioning of psychological tendencies of his time and follow his simultaneous process of learning about and appropriating historical-dialectical materialism. In dialogue with psychological theories—whose contributions he highlights and to which he partially adheres—he strongly criticizes the established ways of approaching human behavior, pointing to the limits of dualistic views, either from idealistic, subjectivist, or introspectionist positions that considered psychic phenomena to be immaterial, or organicist positions that reduced the explanation of human behavior to reactions, conditioned reflexes, and the biological utility of the psyche.

In his famous talk at Moscow University in 1924, entitled “Consciousness as Problem of Psychology of Behavior,” Vygotsky discussed three ways of conceiving, hypothesizing, and studying human behavior, stressing the importance of placing consciousness as a relevant and approachable object of investigation: consciousness as a reflex of reflexes, consciousness as a question of the structure of behavior, and consciousness as a feature of human labor activity (Davydov & Radzikhovskii, 1985; Veresov, 1999; Vygotsky, 1994a). Affirming the material, inescapable biological, organic conditions of human life, he insistently argued that, beyond reflexes, the structure of human behavior should be considered; and, in considering human behavior, will and consciousness, as specific human features, should be taken into account. The question was how to frame the problem and how to find the appropriate method and means of analysis.

The acknowledged relevance of Vygotsky’s contributions in that talk can be seen in his critical examination of current psychological tendencies; his pondering about the human experience—as social, historical, duplicated, mediated by words and signs; his stress on the notion of activity—practical, labor activity—as the reality that determines the mind; and the distinction he made between object of study, unit of analysis, and explanatory principle in a psychological investigation of consciousness (Davydov & Radizkhovskii, 1985).

One can read in Vygotsky’s line of reasoning a struggle for method and meaning in his search for an explanatory principle for human mind and consciousness, within his untiring dialogue with reflexologists, behaviorists, educators, linguists, artists, and Marx’s philosophy. His approach was an alternative to both classical reflexology and classical behaviorism (Veresov, 1999). What he proposed in this talk was a daring attempt to change the focus and the perspective in psychological studies; an attempt that would acquire strength and internal consistency in his further studies.

In the notes that compose his 1929 article, “Concrete Human Psychology” (Vygotsky, 1986), Vygotsky frames the problem of the complex and contradictory relations between nature/culture, referring to the dialectics of nature and human history (Marx, 1999; Marx & Engels, 1987). Nature itself has no history but produces the conditions for the emergence of Homo sapiens. In this emerging process, the Homo species becomes capable of transforming nature through collective activity, through the creation of tools and instruments, and begins to produce his own conditions of existence, to produce culture and history, (trans)forming himself in this production process. Collectively confronting and overcoming basic needs for the survival of the species opens up new possibilities of transformation of nature and knowledge elaboration, making viable the historical emergence of consciousness in the concrete, material conditions of life. The history of man is, hence, the history of the transformation of his own way of being, which implies the pathway from the order of nature to the order of culture (Pino, 2000). The human being becomes the craftsman, the architect of himself.

Vygotsky sought to understand—and to find a plausible explanation for—the cultural development of human beings in this history of production of his/her own existence. It is through the prism of history and dialectics that human behavior and development are approached and studied by the author. As Leontiev admitted, the question of methodology is the main question “when we are dealing with Vygotsky’s creative work.” Internal dialectics, as well as a historical perspective in the examination of a phenomenon, formed, in principle, the characteristic feature of his thinking. “The understanding of the foundations of Marxist dialectics lifted Vygotsky’s thinking to a qualitative new level” (Leontiev, 1997, p. 19).

Indeed, going back to his earliest texts (1921–1924), we find more elements to compose a history of Vygotsky’s theoretical elaborations related to his practice as a teacher and researcher in education.

At the opening of his Educational Psychology, Vygotsky asks “But what is education?” and states: “The problem of education is at the very heart of the new psychology”; “The construction of a course of educational psychology on a sociobiological foundation is, therefore, my principal intention, [. . .] the construction of an objective and rigorous scientific system of educational psychology” (Vygotsky, 1997b, pp. 1; xvii, xix). In this collection of texts, in which he approaches an ample spectrum of educational issues, he clearly admits the role and importance of the social environment, stating that “Man engages in intercourse with nature in no other way than through this environment, and accordingly, the environment is the most important factor governing and establishing man’s behavior” (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 5).

In this period, however, the importance of environment as a determinant factor in human behavior seemed to remain halfway between the behaviorist approach and Marxist principles. In spite of his referring to Marx and Engels’s ideas, assuming the project of a “new man,” claiming that “the revolution undertakes the re-education of all mankind” (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, p. 345), and talking about a classless society, his way of “objectively” explaining the impact of environment was anchored within nature and the structure of the stimuli that molds the child, or to which the child reacts. The notion of environment as external to the individual, as a socially determining, intervening factor, still prevails in Vygotsky’s arguments of human behavior.

Two other fields of involvement and action, related to Vygotsky’s practical and empirical work in this same period, also contribute to his conceptual and theoretical elaborations: his studies in Psychology of Art (1971) and his experience in the field of defectology (1925–1929), two apparently contrastive fields that constitute, for Vygotsky, specific locus of deep concern about human condition, experience, and consciousness.

In Psychology of Art, one central question was: How can a work of art, more specifically, a literary text, provoke an aesthetic reaction? What would be the nature of such human phenomenon? How to study it?—issues that provoked intense debate among formalists, linguists, literary critics. For Vygotsky, the theory of historical materialism, which seeks to construct a scientific analysis of art based on the same principles applied to the study of all forms and phenomena of social life, seemed to be the most advanced and coherent investigative tendency (Vygotsky, 1971). In admitting that studies in psychology had mainly focused either on the artist’s work or the receptor’s reaction, he proposed that psychology concentrate its analysis on the work of art itself. Inspired by the historian’s way of investigating, he suggested the need to introduce indirect analytic methods suitable to the creation of a new object of study.

At the same time, Vygotsky was intensely involved in his work with disabled children, asking himself about the conditions of education and the possibilities of knowledge, will, and consciousness in the most diverse and severe cases of physical and/or mental disability. His first approaches to this field were based on reflexology and on behaviorism, theories that gave him the initial resources for working—and “objectively” studying—such cases. Nonetheless, the theoretical and practical limits of both theoretical approaches became quite evident, impelling him to search for more consistent explanatory principles and moving him to deepen cultural-historical theorization. This was the greatest challenge he faced in his search and arguments for a general theory of human development (Kozulin, 1990; Rieber & Carton, 1993; Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991; Veresov, 1999; Vygotsky, 1987).

The study of the development of children with different disabilities led him to strongly oppose quantitative approaches and to argue for the need to consider the quality, diversity, and uniqueness of the developmental processes. Thus, he defended a profound and comprehensive study of this diversity and an attentive and careful approach to periods and transformations of development (Rieber & Carton, 1993).

Vygotsky’s work in the field of education, particularly in the field of defectology, his broad and profound knowledge of theories in psychology, his experience of and studies on art and literature, his dialogue with Marx and Engels’s historical and dialectical materialism, contributed to his special awareness of the mediating role and function of tools and instruments in human activity, as well as of the status and the power of the word, the verbal form of language in human development and consciousness. The raising of some hypotheses—of the social nature of human mind, of the sign as psychological tool, of mediated activity, of the internalization of culture—emerged as a result of his lived experiences and his philosophical and methodological inquiry with regard to the human concrete conditions of existence.

From Hypotheses to Principles: Developing Research Methods

As Vygotsky incorporated and re-elaborated the theses, assumptions, and arguments of Marxist philosophy, he began to defend and to postulate the social origins or the sociogenesis of human development, positing the primacy of social relations in ontogenetic development. “Not nature, but society must, in the first place, be considered as a determining factor of human behavior. This is the whole idea of cultural development of the child” (Rieber, 1997, p. 59). The notion of environment as social medium does not simply imply a contextual circumstance impacting and modeling the child’s behavior but involves the conception of social relations as an explanatory principle in the formation of the individual mind.

Nonetheless, in assuming that the individual is social in his origins and ways of being still does not solve empirical problems and does not answer theoretical questions. The issue persisted: How to study human development and behavior? How to have access to consciousness? How to approach the relations between individual and society from a psychological perspective? And how to conceive and to access the human psyche in its dynamic and complex unity or entirety?

An initial hypothesis of mediation by tools and symbols in human activity, in both historical and individual dimensions, led Vygotsky to propose and develop methods of study that could give visibility to the engendering of new forms of action and to the emergence of new or unique modes of operation. This hypothesis was the origin of what he called the instrumental, historical-genetic, or double-stimulation method, through which he sought to study the genesis of processes, aiming to create conditions to provoke development and to evidence aspects of the social/individual dynamics of mental functioning. How to conceive, how to interpret, how to give visibility to hidden, not immediately observable processes were great challenges.

Taking as a point of departure that human activity was mediated by instruments and signs created by man, and that this mediated activity integrates the material basis of mental functioning, the issue was how to evidence the ways of producing, appropriating, and transforming means and modes of human action in the course of history. In facing this problem, Vygotsky proposed “The Instrumental Method in Psychology” (1997d), stating that: “By its very essence the instrumental method is a historical-genetic method. It introduces a historical viewpoint in the investigation of behavior: behavior can be understood only as the history of behavior (Blonsky)” (Vygotsky, 1997d, p. 88). To conceive the ontogenetic development as intrinsically intertwined in the historical movement and to design experimental situations to study such development was an important and audacious gesture. He comments on some of the research results:

When we studied the processes of the higher functions in children we came to the following staggering conclusion: each higher form of behavior enters the scene twice in its development—first as a collective form of behavior, as an inter-psychological function, then as an intra-psychological function, as a certain way of behaving. We do not notice this fact because it is too commonplace and we are therefore blind to it. The most striking example is speech. Speech is at first a means of contact between the child and the surrounding people, but when the child begins to speak to himself, this can be regarded as the transference of a collective form of behavior into the practice of personal behavior.

(Vygotsky, 1997d, p. 95)

Vygotsky’s comments on his research conclusions point to some relevant methodological questions: (1) How do processes of higher functions in children become configured as object of study? How are they empirically studied? (2) What becomes noticeable? How? What can be “seen” in the development of a research work? (3) How do the ways of conceiving affect what is or can be seen in an empirical work?

The analyses of prototypical, exemplary situations in the studies of the processes of memorization, egocentric speech, initial writing, children’s play, concept formation, and the zone of proximal development can be followed and appreciated in various accounts and research reports (Leontiev, 2009; Luria, 1977; Vygotsky, 1978, 1987; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994). In all instances, Vygotsky and his collaborators seem to be attentive and careful about the possible ways of proceeding through the design and the analysis of experimental situations. In all cases, we can see reiterated the proposed methodological principles: (1) to study processes, and not static objects; (2) to search for explanations of such processes, not to work on mere descriptions; (3) to look for the essence of the phenomenon, beyond the superficial appearance; (4) to study the processes in movement, that is, to provoke change and development. Underlying this methodological proposal was an emphasis on the historical-genetic approach and the mediating function of psychological tools, which constituted at that time a completely new way of investigating (Vygotsky, 1978, 1997d; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994).

The results of the research work would give support to the later formulation of the “general genetic law of human development” (Vygotsky, 1997d, p. 102). The initial hypotheses gave way to the affirmation of theses; they turned into principles. These theoretical ways of conceiving dialectically affected the ways of seeing and interpreting the empirical phenomena.

In recognizing the role of signs in the historical development of psychic functions, Vygotsky saw in the human possibility of signification, that is, the condition of production of signs and meanings in interpersonal relationships, a plausible way for the understanding of the means/modes of internalization of culture by the child. The interpretation of the genesis or emergence of the pointing gesture in the relationship adult–child–object is indicative of the role of signs in the constitution of mental functioning. It contributes to the explanation of how higher psychic functions may become internalized social relations (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 58). The role of the sign in psychological functioning acquires new status in Vygotsky’s theorizations:

It is also remarkable that signs, whose significance seems to us to be so great in the history of cultural development (as is demonstrated by the history of their development), originally form means of contact, means of acting upon others. When we regard its real origin, each sign is a means of contact and we might say more broadly that it is a mean of contact between certain mental functions of a social character. Transferred to the self, it is also a means of combining functions in oneself and we will be able to demonstrate that without the sign the brain and the original connections cannot form such complex relations as they can due to speech.

(Vygotsky, 1997e, p. 96)

Hence, Vygotsky finds in the human possibility of sign production an explanatory principle for social and individual mental functioning. He admits that the sign transforms interfunctional relations. Signs, words, concepts are the mediating, non-organic, socially produced psychological tools which make possible the inter/intra regulation of human activity. He affirms: “Sociogenesis is the key to higher behavior. We find here the psychological function of the word” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 63). But what does this term “psychological” mean? “Why does the word have a voluntary function for us; why does the word subordinate motor reactions to itself? Whence comes the power of the word over an event?” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 57).

Indeed, these questions raised in the 1929 article (Vygotsky, 1986), constitute a fundamental line of Vygotsky’s inquiry and investigation, leading to his final work on Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky, 1987), where his preface and chapter 1 sound like an aula magna on method. Attempting to appropriate and to methodologically work on Marx’s idea of totality and the way of conceiving the relations whole/part, Vygotsky starts by explaining:

The term “unit” designates a product of analysis that retain all the basic properties of the whole. The unit is a vital and irreducible part of the whole . . . In precisely the same sense, the living cell is the real unit of biological analysis because it preserves the basic characteristics of life that are inherent in the living organism [. . .] What then is a unit that possesses the characteristics inherent to the integral phenomenon of verbal thinking and that cannot be further decomposed? In our view, such unit can be found in the inner aspect of the word, in its meaning.

(Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 45–47)

Initially establishing an analogy with a drop of water, which keeps the unity of two distinct units, and after examining specific problems creating research experiments—among them egocentric speech and concept formation—Vygotsky ended his chapter on “Thought and Word” by affirming that “the (meaningful) word is a microcosm of human consciousness” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 285). It becomes evident, throughout his theoretical work, how his quest for an understanding of human consciousness crosses and distinguishes his entire work.

In spite of the uncountable debates that the concept of “(word) meaning” generated—with regard to the translations from the Russian language; concerning its configurations, whether restricted to a word itself or transcending a given or spoken word; in its relation to a broader signification process; in its relation to sense production in dialogical instances—the fact is that the proposal of such “unit” condensed multiple relations between thinking and speech in its historical, cultural, and individual dimensions. In the midst of so many discussions, it appeared as a viable and challenging analytical unit, reflecting and refracting social relations, social conditions, and dynamics. This theoretical and conceptual gesture, which can be seen itself emerging from the debates at that time (and continues to generate fierce debates through decades), can be considered an extremely relevant methodological contribution. Vygotsky announced further issues, opened some routes, suggested some ways of facing the problems, and left this research work to be realized in posterity.

Thus, following on the issues of meaning and unit of analysis, we bring to the fore a concept that has been acquiring great repercussion, provoking debates and inspiring renewed research on child development: perezhivanie (Fleer, Rey, & Veresov, 2017; MCA, 2016; Meshcheryakov, 2010; Toassa & Souza, 2010; Veresov & Fleer, 2016). We will focus on this concept, examining and exploring its potential as a meaningful unit of analysis for studies on child development.

According to Vygotsky (1994c), perezhivanie condenses the particularities of the environment—the representation of the external elements—and the particularities of the personality—as one lives, feels, signifies it; is configured as an indivisible union of the individual and social, subjective and objective, cognitive and emotional dimensions. This unit makes it possible to explain how the child’s actions affect or produce effects on the environment and this, in turn, becomes a source of psychic development. His findings show that the environment expands as the child develops; that the child expands his or her experience due to the new elements he/she has access to. This means that the analysis of the environment is only possible indirectly by the child’s gestures, by the meaning attributed to each experience, by the way the child affectively relates to a given situation or activity.

Vygotsky argued that a scientific approach to the matter should aim at discovering the “laws of development.” Although this way of formulating his ideas may sound, today, rather deterministic, one should take into account the dialectic and materialistic bases of his thought, as well as an attempt to seek out research methods that would account for dimensions such as integrality, heterogeneity, and plasticity. Thus, he advocated in favor of a qualitative, intersystemic analysis that should consider the complex unity of the different determinant aspects of the developmental processes; the historical movement of trans(formation) of mental functions; the gaps, the diverse rhythms, and trajectories of these processes; the emergence of new psychological formations—society related—; and the existence of optimal periods for the development of personality.

Starting from these premises, the analytical proposal is rooted in the researcher’s choice of a unit of analysis. His method brought to the fore an investigative alternative to the decomposition of phenomena in elements, as used by several sciences, including psychology. Aware of the disadvantages of the latter, Vygotsky considered a whole, complex of organic and social, biological, and cultural factors, all implied in child development.

Thus, when assuming the imbricate child–environment relationship, one of the major efforts may be to sketch the methodological and analytical procedures that allow for studying the multidimensional influence of environment in child psychic development, considering the dynamics and conditions that make up to its configuration, without disregarding the role of the child’s peculiarities. In this sense, perezhivanie emerges as unity of analysis, allowing us to understand how the child attributes meaning to the social relationships he/she experiences.

The analysis of the child–environment relationship, from the point of view of perezhivanie, guides research toward the modes of participation and signification of the child in social practices and relations. It thus widens the way in which child development is conceived, which is considered within the context of concrete conditions, social contradictions, interpersonal relations, interactive dynamics, social demands, and processes of signification.

Word meaning and perezhivanie constitute powerful examples of how Vygotsky conceived the possibilities of studying human consciousness: such units of analysis indicate attempts to configure units within totality, that is, meaningful parts of a dynamic whole, taking into account a complex of multiple historical determinations. Multiple determinations mean here the historical genesis but also the engendering of new forms of being human, of being conscious.

The historical genetic analysis implies, therefore, an understanding of how the child acts/operates in order to provoke development through an intentionally oriented pedagogical intervention. Here lies Vygotsky’s proposal of the construction of the investigative method, in process, in movement. And here also lies the extreme importance of this investigative process related to educational work.

In investigative work, the analytical prism and the analytical gaze demand an attitude of suspension and suspicion with regard to what seems to be obvious or immediately evident. Vygotsky warns about the importance of reading the subtext, of looking for what lies behind, of unraveling what remains hidden, of paying attention to minor details:

The zoologist reconstructs a whole skeleton from an insignificant fragment of bone of some excavated animal and even a picture of its life. An ancient coin, which has no value as a coin, frequently reveals to the archeologist a complex historical problem. The historian, deciphering hieroglyphics scratched into a stone, penetrates into the depths of vanished ages. The doctor diagnoses illness from insignificant symptoms. Only recently has psychology overcome its fear of a vital evaluation of phenomena and begun to learn from insignificant trifles.

(Rieber, 1997, p. 40)

Vygotsky’s investigative perspective toward human development shows itself to be extremely fertile in relation to contemporary research work, entering in dialogue with and setting a sound basis for the enhancing of micro-genetic analyses, ethnographic studies, discourse analysis, indiciary paradigms, and many other fields and approaches.

Repercussions and Implications of Vygotsky’s Ideas: Contemporary Research in Education

At the introduction of the first English translation of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, Jerome Bruner remarked that “Vygotsky’s conception of development was at the same time, a theory of Education” (1962, p. v). Later, in the prologue of the first volume of Vygotsky’s Collected Works, which included Thinking and Speech, Bruner admitted that, at that time, he “didn’t know half of it.” And expanded: “For ‘education’ implies for Vygotsky not only the development of the individual’s potential, but the historical expression and growth of the human culture from which Man springs” (Bruner, 1987, pp. 1–2; also Moll, 1990, p. 1).

Vygotsky’s most vivid involvement with and genuine commitment to education in revolutionary times certainly made possible the elaboration of an inspiring theory of human activity. His living experience and ample dialogue with so many interlocutors in different areas of knowledge contributed to the development of an innovative process of theoretical construction. Strong repercussions of his way of conceiving investigation and intervention processes in psychology and education still reverberate.

Since the 1980s, an enormous amount of research has explored and expanded upon Vygotsky’s proposals, with Brazil being one of the Latin America countries that contributes most to the studies and debates, especially in the field of education. At the end of the 1970s, Latin America was immersed in restless political times and Brazil was experiencing the last years of dictatorship. Brazilian thinkers and educators searched for consistent alternative theories that could contribute to an understanding of the changing conditions of human development and educational process. When Vygotsky’s ideas reached Brazil, they fell on fruitful ground already fertilized by Paulo Freire’s thoughts concerning education and the social and political elaboration of consciousness. Both authors shared Marxist principles and assumptions.

With regard to the issue of method, many authors have commented on Vygotsky’s works, tracing the development of his theoretical and methodological elaborations, describing and commenting on principles and processes, highlighting his main arguments and special contributions to the fields of psychology and education (Bernardes, 2010; Davydov & Radzickowskii, 1985; Kozulin, 1990; Leontiev, 1997; Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991; Veresov, 1999; Wertsch, 1985b; Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992; Yarochevski, 1989; Yaroshevsky & Gurgenidze, 1997; Zanella, Reis, Titon, Urnau, & Dassoler, 2007). Some have specifically discussed the methodological value and the challenges of his notion of unit of analysis (Matusov, 2007; Toomela, 2017; Van der Veer, 2001; Zinchenko, 1985).

But it is in the field of education that Vygotsky’s ideas become more profoundly rooted and branched at the same time. His theoretical and methodological principles have been directly affecting research in education, at once anchoring and leading to some daring ways of intervening and investigating. We may ask: What are objects of investigation in contemporary times? And how are these currently framed? As inscribed in Vygotsky’s own ways of inquiry, attention to the concrete conditions of human development become imperative in studying such development, related to the historical elaboration of social/individual consciousness.

Many authors have been working on and calling attention to specific objects of study involving formal education contexts and policies, special and inclusive education, and education in diverse communities and minority groups, focusing on teaching–learning relationships and discussing means and modes of culture appropriation in participation with social practices.

Among those whose investigative work has been shared through academic production, we can mention, from the late 1970s through the 1980s—following the first translations and dissemination of Vygotsky’s ideas in Europe and Americas—the attempts of Wertsch, Stone, Rogoff, and Hickmann to develop what they called microgenetic analysis, deriving from Vygotsky’s notions of internalization and zone of proximal development (Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984; Wertsch & Hickmann, 1987; Wertsch & Stone, 1978). At that time, Scribner and Cole were also developing research on culture and cognition, trying to understand many different ways of thinking and learning through a Vygotskian approach (Cole, 1985; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Scribner & Cole, 1981).

Interdisciplinary studies at the intersections of psychology, anthropology, and education, involving learning in communities of practice, school communities, and processes of schooling, did also develop, with focus on cultural and teaching practices with lower-class, marginal or immigrant children, indigenous or rural people (Candela & Rockwell, 1991; Hedegaard, 1990, 1996; Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Paradise, 1991; Rockwell, 1999; Rockwell & Mercado, 1999).

Indeed, it was during the 1990s that knowledge production in the historical-cultural perspective experienced a major boom. An uncountable number of papers, articles, books, and collections of texts, containing research accounts, and discussion of concepts and their practical implications in educational contexts, acquired visibility in scientific meetings and publications. During this decade, the world’s new political configurations, globalization processes, and the development of technologies created fresh conditions for production, access, and academic exchange, which have expanded and become still more dynamic over the course of the 21st century. At least three journals disseminated Vygotsky’s main ideas and research: Mind, Culture and Activity (originated 1994); Culture and Psychology (originated 1995); and the Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, from 1992, previously entitled Soviet Psychology (1966–1991).

These conditions not just allowed for but enhanced access to works and ideas developed by Vygotsky’s colleagues and followers—including teaching methods and didactics, such as Davydov’s proposal of developmental teaching (Davydov, 1988, 1995, 1999)—whose renewed contributions relate to the expansion of the idea of experimental teaching situations (Chaiklin, 2003; Libâneo & Freitas, 2013; Longarezi & Puentes, 2013).

The volumes edited by Moll (1990), Góes and Pino (1991), Daniels (1993), Wertsch, Del Rio, and Alvarez (1995), Chaiklin and Lave (1996), Moro, Schneuwly, and Brossard (1997), Hedegaard and Lompscher (1999), Clot (1999b, 2012), Chaiklin (2001), Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev, and Miller (2003), Daniels, Cole, and Wertsch (2007), Daniels and Hedegaard (2011), Davis, Clemson, Jansson, and Marjanovic-Shane (2015), and Yasnitsky, Van der Veer, and Ferrari (2014) bear witness to the broad and representative group of educators and researchers working in the field, and include studies on the most diverse conditions of development.

It is still important to highlight the works of authors who, more recently, have explicitly commented on the political aims and the ethical commitments implied in Vygotsky’s theoretical and methodological proposals, exploring and emphasizing the proposals’ strength and pertinence for contemporary research and educational work (Delari Junior, 2015; Stetsenko, 2016, 2017).

Following a worldwide tendency, the historical-cultural research perspective became vastly disseminated during these last decades in Brazil. Research groups based at universities and investigation centers across the country took up the Vygotskian principles and methods and launched different kinds of projects with the aim of understanding and explaining life and teaching–learning conditions of families, schools, and other institutions where formal or non-formal education takes place (Duarte, 1996; Góes, 1996; Oliveira, 1993; Smolka, 1988, 2000; Smolka & Góes, 1993). They were committed, as well, to producing change in these social settings. The great variety of objects and focuses of study, as well as the number of researchers involved in this process, makes it impossible to enumerate them. Still, some examples can be cited, such as: studies on pedagogical practices and ways of teaching and learning, public and state educational policies, literacy and knowledge acquisition (Aguiar, 2006; Duarte, 1996; Facci, Tuleski, & Barroco, 2009; Mortimer, 2000; Sforni, Bernardes, & de Moura, 2003; Smolka & Nogueira, 2013), special education and inclusive education (Góes & Laplane, 2004; Padilha & Oliveira, 2013), early childhood education, foster care and adoption (Rossetti-Ferreira, Amorim, Soares-Silva, & Carvalho, 2003; Rossetti-Ferreira, Costa, Serrano, Mariano, & Solon, 2008), and the use of technical-semiotic tools (Freitas, 2009), among many others.

All over the world, researchers creatively discussed other theoretical and methodological tendencies, perspectives, and techniques derived from sociology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and political science, producing new syntheses (as in Álvarez & Del Río, 2007; Clot, 1999a; Del Río, 2002, 2007; Engestrom, 2007; Engestrom, Sannino, & Virkkunen, 2014; González Rey, 2016a, 2016b). The first consolidated research groups became the locus of a new generation of researchers who carried on the task of developing new research agendas (Veresov, Smolka, & Paradise, 2013). They went on to include emerging problems consonant with the historical, political, and theoretical movements that impacted social, educational practices.

The historical-cultural perspective has a solid worldwide presence. In Brazil, in the last decades different sources that include Vygotsky’s concepts and ideas integrate the curricula of several university courses (psychology, pedagogy, special education) besides official educational documents and curricular guidelines and policies concerning basic and special education. Research results often substantiate debates, discussions, and the elaboration of policies at state, municipal, or national levels. But in spite of this apparent adhesion to the perspective, this has been, nonetheless, a locus of intense struggle. Struggle not just for proclaiming “education for all” or “all for education,” but for de facto work on transforming and creating new concrete conditions of existence, diminishing the extreme inequality of human life conditions.

If, as Vygotsky affirmed, social relations are the main determining factor in human individual activity, research on human development and education should take into account the dynamics of such relations and conditions. Conceived itself as an intervening and (trans)forming process, the research activity demands a sensible approach to individuals’ most diverse ways of acting, relating, appropriating tools and symbols, and producing meaning, that is, participating in social practices. Formal education, historically instituted with the aim of orienting and creating modes of individual and collective participation in culture, thus becomes a privileged locus for the study of the human (conditions of) development—individual, social, historical.

As Stetsenko (2016, 2017) notes, Vygotsky thought of a new psychology aimed at the reconstruction of society based on the principles of justice, solidarity, and social equality, thus implying a sociopolitical ethics that challenges the ideology of adaptation associated with the premise of passivity, innate inequality, and social control. From this perspective, method can be understood as a means/mode of organizing theoretical-practical activity, articulated with the historical construction of collective/individual consciousness aiming at social transformation.

The principles of historical-dialectical materialism can be recognized in the basis of the concepts Vygotsky formulates, as well as in the analytical instruments he relies on, to investigate the process of human development and to define his object of study and method. Adequacy between object and method means, in this context, to make choices and to justify them by the principles he assumes.

Vygotsky’s methodological considerations impel us to understand the (trans)formative character of education as sociohistorical practice and to stress the ethical and political dimensions of knowledge production. These are closely related to the social commitment inscribed in the act of researching, which assumes a qualitative, non-neutral approach, underpinned by social problems and fraught with the commitment to create conditions of cultural development—especially through education—of groups subjected to exclusion processes due to social inequality, cultural diversity, disability, or other conditions. Particularly in the field of education, this theoretical-methodological perspective is promising in support of research that links the problem of human development to educational practices. It provides the means to investigate and theorize about development and social life, exploring the status and meaning of transformative educational practices.