Abstract
Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding
over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental
psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of
distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of
scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible
criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter
is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and
apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory.