Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) was a Soviet polymath, and especially psychologist who worked in areas such as developmental psychology and (what we now call) special education. Vygotsky was very influential, but fell out of favour in the Stalinist purges when many Soviet academicians were accused of work which was not sufficiently aligned with the executive's preferred interpretation of Marxism. Vygotsky died of tuberculosis aged 37.
He worked with Alexander Luria whose work later became well known in the West. Vygotsky's work was championed by Jerome Bruner, and his ideas of the zone of proximal development and notions of mediation of learning (scaffolding) are still influential today.
Read about The zone of proximal development
Read about scaffolding of leanring
