Sense of Community in the School

Abstract

The importance of creating and sustaining learning communities in which all members are valued can be traced to Vygotsky’s theory in which culture plays a central role in developmental processes. Vygotsky (1978) suggested that all learning is culturally mediated, historically developing, and arising from cultural activity. Leontiev describes Vygotsky’s cultural method of thinking as developing in a system of human relationships: if we removed human activity from the system of social relationships, it would not exist…the human individual’s activity is a system of social relations. It does not exist without these reactions (Leontiev, 1981, pp. 46–47).