Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 20
Alexander R. Luria
WARREN SCHEIDEMAN
Alexander Luria contributes to the historical identification and understanding of new spaces for
learning. To contextualize Luria one needs to locate his thinking in a biographic relationship to
the ethnic, linguistic, and geographical complexity of Russia, and to relate him to the work of
Lev Vygotsky, which centers on historical materialism. Historical materialism interprets history
as the contextualizing agent, or determinant, for human thought and intellectual creation. Luria
essentially focuses on the space inhabited by learners in time (across time, transhistorically) and
how they can think, grow, and develop within that space, thus making it transformative, given
the opportunity of language, values, cultural setting, and the intellectual capital available to their
minds.
Alexander Luria’s field was psychology. He was born in Kazan, Russia, near Moscow in 1902.
Throughout his career he linked development and functioning of inner human mental process
with outer environment, society, and culture. One way of phrasing this is that Luria’s focus is
on the activity transforming the inner and the outer self and the dynamic interactivity between
mind and culture. He saw culture as mediating psychological processes. He viewed intelligence
in relationship to historical and social environment. He regarded language as the “tool of tools.”
During the Second World War, Luria developed neuropsychology, the study of brain and thought.
To define Luria’s significance, he connects intelligence and brain through activity with the
social and cultural environment, context, particularly with mediation of language as a learning
tool for making tools with which to learn. He puts an interesting metaphor to work, language
as tooling up, to make tools to learn. An imaginary diagram is important: visualize the brain,
which is inside the person, while the environment surrounds the person from the outside, and
activity and language mediate back and forth. Luria’s focus is on how the circuits are connected.
Intellectual and cultural dynamics are at play in the dynamic process mediating brain and culture.
As an entry generalization to the study of Luria, with some oversimplification, Luria related the
psychological process of thought with the linguistic and social, the historical context, the cultural
milieu. He vividly connects, rather than separate, intelligence and environment. He extends instead
of narrowing and dead-ending the human capacity for growth through intelligence interactive with
sustaining social and cultural context. Much of his dynamic is cued by the phrase “at play.” Luria
focuses on cultural and social fostering that occurs inherently within cultures, which is part of