Socio-Cultural Perspective

Socio-cultural perspective emphasizes the role of culture and social interaction in the process of child development. Lev Vygotsky, the propounder of socio-cultural perspective, focuses that a child’s thinking does not develop in a vacuum but rather is influenced by the sociocultural context in which s/he grows up. 

Vygotsky believed that the development of memory, attention and reasoning includes learning to use the language, mathematical systems and memory strategies that is prevalent in a society. Thus, it is clear that each culture provides its members with certain tools of thought. The ways in which individuals in various cultures passed information to posterity is embodied in various languages; thereby shape thoughts. Hence we may say that thinking varies across social and historical contexts. 

The collaborative strategy that is used in classrooms with which you are familiar is developed from this socio-cultural perspective. In this strategy, knowledge is not generated from within the individual but rather is constructed through interaction with other people who have different thought processes and who belong to various cultures. When Piaget considered children as independent explorers, Vygotsky tended to see them as social beings who develop their minds through their interactions with parents, teachers, and others as scaffold.