Mercedes Chaves Jaime
Mercedes Chaves Jaime was a Colombian psycopedagogue, professor and educational researcher. Chaves established herself as a notable Vygotskian pedagogue in Latin America.
Work
Her work extended to early childhood education and cognitive stages for child development in read/write processes. She was inspired by the work of the Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, the founder of cultural-historical psychology.Chaves was a proponent of the empty acts theory in children's learning processes. The theory argues that the relationship between teachers and students must be focused on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, in order to avoid negative interactions with other students, potencializing the ability to interpret, as a complex interaction between the text and the reader, the information symbols represent, and to be able to re-create those same symbols so that others students can derive the same meaning.