Zona de desenvolvimento próximo: uma análise das produções científicas sobre a apropriação do conceito

Abstract

The Historical-Cultural Theory and the appropriations of this still create significant discussions. L. S. Vygotsky is one of its main theorists and the proximal development zone (PDZ) concept is one of the most widespread concepts among those elaborated by the author. As from the questions about the way in which this concept can be interpreted and its importance in the way we understand human development, our objective is to analyze both the use as the theoretical appropriations of the PDZ concept in scientific productions published in Portuguese language and its consequences. For the author, culture is a product of social life and social activity of the human being, and any higher psychological function (language, thought, attention, memory etc.) is constituted by an external stage of development, once that these functions are expressed in the social. Social relations are genetically found before all higher psychological functions and their relations. The PDZ emerges as an important concept for understanding the relationships of learning and development processes. Learning creates the PDZ and allows the prospective determination of development dynamics by considering both what has already been produced and what is still in the process of development. Based on these considerations, we carried out a bibliographical survey of scientific productions in Portuguese using the concept of zone of proximal development. The survey was carried out in the databases CAPES Portal, Google Academic and BVS Psi Brazil, without date of publication, with the descriptors proximal development zone, imminent development zone, zone of potential development, potential development zone and development immediate zone. There were 1,715 references. Among these, we performed a refinement with the inclusion of the descriptors Psychology and Education, reaching the number of 75 articles, theses and dissertations to compose our analysis. The analysis allowed us some considerations regarding the concept of PDZ and its relationship with the concepts of development and learning; the need for an understanding of the historicity of the author's work; to the translation of the author's works, in which several passages were suppressed or modified; to the vigotskian understanding of social relations and how these present an immediatist character in the analyzed works; and the conception of education that is reflected in the productions and in the way we produce science. This corroborates the importance for us to look at what we produce and how we are linked to the development of Historical-Cultural Theory. It seems to us that working with the development of the human being without paying attention to the general forms of alienation that corroborate a class society and the exploitation of one of these classes does not allow deep discussion and promotion of development.