The Proximal Process

Not every interaction between a developing person and her environment produces developmental change. Bronfenbrenner spent the second half of his career insisting on this with increasing precision, because the field kept generalizing “interaction” into vagueness—treating any contact between a child and an environment as a developmental force. It is not. The proximal process is an interaction with specific properties, each of which is necessary and none of which is sufficient alone. The interaction must be reciprocal: the developing person acts on the environment, and the environment responds in ways that elicit further action. It must be progressively complex: the challenge increases over time, pulling the developing person toward the edge of current capacity—what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development. It must occur regularly over extended periods: a single rich exposure does not produce developmental change. And it must involve the persons, objects, and symbols in the developing person's immediate environment—the microsystem,