The Office Dies a Long-Overdue Death

Source: Max Fischer/Pexels

As if the past year somehow weren’t sufficiently trippy, I recently came across something that really blew my mind. An irate parent forwarded a complaint to a teaching colleague about how her son had scored poorly on his ZPD. My first reaction was, predictably, WTF? My second, that maybe too many people have read Vygotsky but in the same way as a former classmate, who summed up his experience of reading Finnegans Wake as “I read it, just not personally.” My third response made me think harder about the way education and office work alike have leveraged a nearly 90-year-old hypothesis, formulated by a man trained as a lawyer and philologist and founded on scattershot observations gathered from teachers of young children.

If you dodged the work of Lev Vygotsky in grad school, ZPD stands for the "zone of proximal development," a concept Vygotsky introduced in the 1930s. According to the common interpretation of Vygotsky’s hypothesis, children can improve their grasp of novel concepts more rapidly when they collaborate in small groups than when they work independently. However, Vygotsky’s own wording (in translation) is dramatically different from current understandings of the zone of proximal development (aka ZPD): “[The zone of proximal development] is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Mind in Society, 1978, p. 86).

However, the way that education has primarily used Vygotsky’s concept of ZPD omits the real equation Vygotsky outlined in defining the concept. On one side, we have the independent learner, struggling valiantly and quite possibly fruitlessly without assistance from anyone, in the era before WikiHow, Quora, or YouTube. On the other, we have the learner grasping a concept with assistance either from an adult or more savvy peers. Unfortunately, for decades, generations of educators have viewed peers as more capable than teachers at helping students negotiate barriers to learning, presumably because they themselves overcame the same barriers far more recently than teachers did.

In other words, the much-vaunted ZPD that undergirds the standard creative writing workshop model and classroom small groups alike assumes that learners only overcome their internal obstacles to learning or mastery when they collaborate with peers. In fact, this use of ZPD mangles the hypothesis Vygotsky put forward. Unsurprisingly, Vygotsky’s work gained widespread acceptance in educational curricula in the 1960s, the same era that eventually gave us the open classroom, small student working groups, and, of course, the open-plan office.

In this week’s New York Times, the old canard that offices are hothouses of innovation and creative collaboration, especially the open-plan numbers with cereal bars and bean bags, has finally begun to sink under the weight of evidence that the office environment probably does more to stifle than to goose along innovation and equality among peers. This same open-plan office was usually so filled with mumbled phone conversations and the clacking of hundreds of keys that getting work—let alone innovative, creative work—done at all usually necessitated noise-canceling headphones. (Not exactly conducive to teamwork, togetherness, or creative collaboration.) Instead, as researchers have discovered, office settings quashed creative thinking, while remote meetings can facilitate it. To the open office: Rest in pieces.

We’ve long had the technology that could support remote collaboration, as I and my colleagues researching hypermedia in the mid-1980s discovered, when all we had was email and Internet Relay Chat. I once asked Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter—two pioneers who created the still-surprisingly sophisticated hypermedia authoring tool StorySpace—how many times they had met face-to-face across what was then perhaps 5-7 years. Both had to think: Perhaps a dozen times, Michael volunteered.

But back to the abuse of ZPD and how students now receive some sort of numeric grade on ZPD in some benighted school, doubtless seized on during the data-point frenzy otherwise known as "No Child Left Behind." Vygotsky introduced a useful concept that helped inform teaching before anyone conducted studies in education designed as randomized, controlled trials, let alone technology for accurately assessing how much or how fast we learn, with or without the assistance of teachers or other students. But his ZPD is a hypothesis from a world and a time as remote from our own as the Middle Ages, and one that has been perhaps willfully misinterpreted to fit the beliefs of each age that has embraced it.