Vygotsky has inspired generations of psychologists and educationists to reconceive learning and teaching. Yet existing sociocultural and activity theory, extensions of Vygotsky’s work, have not tended to frame learning as complex in the ways that Jörg has. Still, Vygotsky did share Jörg’s concern for the vast inefficiencies of traditional pedagogy, as well as his passionate belief that radically more effective instruction was possible: “We have given the child a pennyʹs worth of instruction and the consequence has been a dollarʹs worth of development. A single step in instruction can represent a hundred steps in development”. Enlisting Vygotsky to aid in the framing of a complex pedagogy seems eminently reasonable. Vygotsky’s unique place in psychology owes to his “genetic law of cultural development”:
“Any function in the child’s cultural development appears on stage twice, on two planes.
First it appears on the social plane, then on the psychological, first among people as an
interpsychical category and then within the child as an intrapsychical category.”
Jörg looks to Vygotsky to help focus complexity in education on the effectivity of social interaction. But Vygotsky offered far more than a position on the social foundations of development; he offered a full‐bodied theorization of the process.
Learning Change 