Breaking the continuum. Cultural-historical perspectives on development and the case of autism

This article revisits Lev S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory through the perspective of developmental discontinuity. While the dominant paradigms in developmental psychology and pedagogy continue to prioritize normativity and gradual progress, Vygotsky’s work offers a radically different ontology of the subject. In this light, autism can be interpreted not as a deviation from typical development, but as a generative site for questioning the epistemological and pedagogical assumptions that underlie mechanistic and behaviourist models. From this perspective, development cannot be reduced to observable achievements or fixed milestones, but unfolds through the subject’s mediated engagement with a socially and culturally constructed world of meanings. Building on a critical and theoretical analysis of Vygotsky’s texts and recent research, this article explores the pedagogical implications of this framework and proposes a dialectical model of inclusive education in which the educator is reconceived as a cultural mediator, who supports the learner’s appropriation of symbolic tools. Rather than aiming for normalization, this approach affirms difference as a constitutive dimension of development and locates pedagogical practice within an emancipatory logic of transformation. In this way, it aims to open up new perspectives for the research and practice of inclusive education and to encourage educators and theorists to rethink how discontinuity and neurodiversity can reshape pedagogical paradigms.