Scaffolding as an Intervention Methodology

by Kate Bale Scaffold Supplier

If people's lives were a building, you could say that, when they come for consultations, they are trapped in a room, they have no stairs or elevator to access the other floors. So you have to build scaffolding to build stairs and elevators. When these are built, then the scaffolding can be removed and people remain free to move. Michael White has drawn this concept of scaffolding from the work of two pedagogues: Lev Vygotski (the area of near development) and Jerome Bruner (the shoring up of consciousness).

Shoring for Environmental Containment

For his part, wondered how the tutor (adult, more capable peer, etc.) brings the child to consciousness and concluded that it provides a support allowing the learner to conceptualize, develop an abstract thought.

Michael White then modeled this shoring and forged the concept of "scaffolding". The purpose of the scaffolding is to bring a person to cross, step by step, the spaces between the territory of what is "familiar and known" to him (his experience, the world of action) and the territory of what 'it is "possible to know" (the meaning it can give, the world of consciousness). This scaffolding is deployed in five points:

Low level of distancing

The practitioner invites the narrator to describe the specific event / experience in his own words, to give a definition as close as possible to the experience and to characterize it by giving it a name.

Verbalization is the first level of abstraction in relation to experience. This is why this level is called "low" level of distancing.

Medium level of distancing

The practitioner encourages the narrator to make connections between the specific event / experience and other events / experiences in his life. It thus allows the development of chains of association and the establishment of links and relationships between events hitherto distinct and unrelated.

This linking of the event with others makes it possible to create an additional distance from the event and foreshadows the possibility of "thinking about".

Medium-high level of distancing

The practitioner asks the narrator to reflect on these links and chains of association and to draw conclusions, discoveries, interpretations, learnings, awareness, always related to the event / specific experience.

This reflection in which the narrator is guided brings him into the abstract world of his values, his preferences, what is precious to him. The distance from experience is beginning to be great.

High level of distancing

The practitioner leads the narrator to abstract these awareness of their specific context and their concrete circumstances, so as to forge concepts concerning life and identity.

The narrator, at this stage, is far from experience. His level of abstraction is high. His position regarding his identity and his life is freed from the initial experience.

Very high level of distancing

The practitioner allows the narrator to predict the result of specific actions that he could implement based on the development of the concepts updated in the previous step.