This article is featured in the Summer 2024 issue of Touching Base, our quarterly newsletter for professionals in the health and social care sector. If you would like to sign up for this newsletter, use the form at the bottom of this page.
In the Winter 2024 edition of Touching Base, when we discussed our approach to Positive Behaviour Support, we suggested we would explore more in a future edition about ways in which we have been inspired by the psychologist Vygostsky’s famous theory of the Zone of Proximal Development. We have used his ideas to explore how both partners in any interaction must learn from each other, learn how to understand each other, and find out from each other how to negotiate communication and language skills and strategies that help both to get the most out of the world around them.
Let us first open up some general ideas around communication. If any of us – whether we be teachers, support workers, therapists or parents – are truly interested in developing good communication partnerships, then we believe it is about acknowledging anything that comes from another person as potentially communicative, and can be the basis to develop an effective partnership. It doesn’t matter if it is through words, signs, actions, gestures or movements.
Our starting point should be to presume that somebody is attempting to make a connection with us: to tell us something, to reach out to us. To do otherwise (for example, if we decide another person is unable to communicate with us) is to risk not looking for communication overtures, not seeing any invitations to interact, or not seeing the other person as an equal communicator. If we do see the other person as a potential communication partner, then they can become so – in fact, they will become so. These ideas are explored more in this short film – but you will already see that this hints that both people in a communication partnership can make contributions and develop meaningful interactions in the partnership.
This takes us then to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which is described as the distance between the actual and potential developmental levels of children. This gap is bridged with the help of more competent others. The diagram below illustrates this and describes the ZPD as what a learner can do with support:
In this article, I write more about educational and psychological concepts and models inspired by Vygotsky’s thinking that describe learning as ‘scaffolded’ (Wood, 1988), ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff et al., 1998), ‘assisted performance’ Tharp and Gallimore, 1998), or a process in which children are guided to ‘construct knowledge’ (Mercer, 1995). In whatever way this learning process is described, there is an underlying assumption that the more competent other has an end goal in mind. However, if we now think about how communication and language might develop for a person who is born deafblind, let us first consider that there is probably nowhere in the world where a natural, tactile language has yet spontaneously developed. And where shared languages have developed, it will be because teachers, or parents, or support workers etc. and people with deafblindness have worked together to develop these languages.
Of course, if I am a teacher of a pupil with deafblindness, then I might be more knowledgeable about language than this five- or six-year-old child in front of me. The child, however, will be much more knowledgeable about living in a world where touch is your primary source of contact with the world – since that is their whole life experience. This then suggests that part of my job as a teacher is to impart some of my skill, knowledge, and experience to the child – but I also have to become the learner and let the child teach me something about their experiences. We have to learn from each other if we really want to work out how a natural, tactile language can develop between us.
This sounds like an expansion of Vygotsky’s ZPD and, from Norman Brown – who was the father of a young man who was deafblind – we learned that we should think more of a double-sided zone of proximal development, where each person learns from the other. Of course, there is still a role for teachers to help the child to bridge gaps in their skill and knowledge, but there are also parts where the child can help teachers to bridge the gaps in their skills and knowledge. Thus, as teachers, support workers, therapists, parents, or any communication partners working alongside another person, we have to set our egos, and any notion that we have all the answers, aside.
The more I have thought about this idea in recent years, the more I wonder if this applies not just to the field of congenital deafblindness, but also in relation to autism, learning disabilities, or any communication or learning partnerships. It is never about imposing learning from outside – instead, it is about co-creating learning, languages, and shared understanding of the world that emerges from the contributions of both partners and is rooted in the cultural and world experiences of each. It gets close to what the famous American psychologist, Bruner, described as the ideal teacher, as one who ‘leads by following’. This idea of a double-sided ZPD allows us to see that both (or all) partners in an interaction are learning and contributing just as equally as the other. If you want a reminder of some of these ideas then you can watch this short film.
If you want to explore these ideas further in relation to assessment approaches that reveal someone’s cognitive potentials and a willingness to see people as ‘exceptional fellows’, then you could follow up with either of these longer films:
These videos first relate the double-sided ZPD to this recent publication, which argues that cognition can be found at the meeting place between people and through activities that reveal the potentials that people have. It is not about having a one-size-fits-all assessment tool that can provide all the answers, especially if that assessment tool has been developed against the background of what a seeing-hearing child should be able to do. The cognitive potentials of a child become more visible if you first have a belief that they are there to be found, nurtured and developed.
This all sits comfortably within a recent book, “An Exceptional Fellow – A Father’s Story” by Svein Olav Klset, in which there are chapters entitled “The Swimmer”, “The Skier”, and “A Hero and His Family”. In using such terms we can see this father is moving well beyond seeing his son, Torgeir, as someone with deafblindness – instead, he is a son who is a hero… and that then changes how we see his son. Early in the book he describes how Torgeir won his first battle during the hospital stay in those first few weeks of his life: “He no longer needed an additional oxygen supply. We could hold him for the first time since the day he was born. It was indescribable. A banality for parents of healthy children. A seven-mile stride for our little hero”.
One of my favourite parts of the book is when he describes the time when the family moved from Norway to the United States. He particularly remembers the occasions when the family found Torgeir to be a ‘door opener’ – the one who could help the family make connections.
This book can help us think again about what it is to be teachers, support workers, therapists or parents; it can help us to find language to describe the skills and the competencies that we are discovering that people have. We can all strive to reveal the exceptional in anyone we come across in life. And indeed, we can find the exceptional in ourselves, because only if we imagine ourselves to be capable of becoming exceptional communication partners, can we be open to the learning that will flow from the day-to-day interactions we have with people we meet. We owe it to all of our fellow travellers on this learning journey to equip them so that they can reveal our exceptional nature and in turn for us to reveal their exceptional nature.
If you have any questions or would like to follow-up on any ideas presented in this article, please get in touch. We would love to hear from you.
You can also check out this page for a deeper dive into the topics presented in this article.
Written by Dr Paul Hart, Head of Operational Support, Practice Development and Quality