Play, Games, Schooling, Labor, and Social Trajectories: Vygotsky’s Cultural Continuum of Human Development / El juego, los juegos, los estudios, el trabajo y los itinerarios sociales: el continuo cultural del desarrollo humano

This essay focuses on Vygotsky’s attention to long-term, mediated human development, with primary emphasis on the role of play, imagination, and games in the socialization of children and adolescents, and on the role of schooling in shaping the experiences of students toward cultural ends. To Vygotsky, both play/imagination/games and schooling have long-term goals and effects in human development, designed to promote the labor available to Soviet Marxist citizens. Vygotsky is often represented as a daily instructional planner via scaffolding, in spite of its absence in his writing. Vygotsky’s attention to cultural development is quite different from the short-term teaching and learning for which he is primarily, and erroneously, referenced in much educational writing. Furthermore, his view of play is often treated as an immediate experience rather than as a key facet of a lifelong developmental process. This essay is designed to interrogate such misconceptions and integrate two areas of his work that are not ordinarily treated as a continuum in educational writing.