Re/thinking the Zone of Proximal Development (Symmetrically)

The notion of zone of proximal development has come to be used widely to theorize learning and learning opportunities. Unfortunately, following a simplified reading of its original definition and primary sense in the quote that opens this text, the concept tends to be thought of in terms of the opposition of individuals. One of these individuals, a teacher or peer, is more capable than another individual, the learner. Somehow they engage in an “inter-mental” or “inter-psychological” plane from where the learner constructs knowledge from himor herself on an “intra-mental” or “intrapsychological” plane. That is, such conceptualizations convey a substantialist approach that thinks learning as knowledge assimilation and collectivity in terms of ensembles of individual actors interacting unproblematically. Their interaction is thematized through the dubious prism of the differences of what happens within the individual consciousness and what happens in collective consciousness—as if they could exist separately. Speaking is reduced to the individual, subjective intention of the speaker, who, in speaking, is considered to externalize ideas that have previously formed on the inside. The approach is substantialist in that it takes some prior situation, including the institutional positions of the participants in an interaction (i.e., teacher, student), and uses it to make causal attribution about the events that ensue. But such approaches are unsatisfactory given that there is insufficient attention to the co-constitutive nature of subjective consciousness and collective consciousness. More so, such approaches convey notions of verbal expressions