COLLABORATION IN THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined as the space between what a learner can do without help and where the learner needs significant instruction. The ZPD is at the edge of where a learner can succeed only with mentor guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers-in other words someone who has a broader knowledge, experience, or skill set. This kind of support has been termed scaffolding. Scaffolding suggests a temporary and flexible support that can be quickly and easily assembled and disassembled once the learning task is accomplished. The learner's ZPD development is expanded and scaffolding is moved to the edge of the new learning frontier. Giving learners the most rigorous tasks they can do with minimal scaffolding leads to the greatest learning gains. This paper discusses the ZPD in terms of a collaborative design project where collaborative mentors use a student-created artefact to pull a learner to a series of "need to know" places--places that indicate the edge of the learner's independent ability. The successful completion of the artefact requires the learner to connect with a number of collaborators, courses, and disciplines, each with specific knowledge, experience, tools, and/or skillsets. These collaborative mentors combine to provide the scaffolding the learners need to complete the artefact in a efficient and uninterrupted path. We further discuss the advantages of extending this "need to know" impetus across course boundaries in a collaborative teaching environment and the struggles of implementing a more complex collaborative design project.