Cultural-historical activity theory

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)[1] is a theoretical framework[2] which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind (what people think and feel) and activity (what people do).[3][4][5] It traces its origins to the founders[6] of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky[7] and Aleksei N. Leontiev.[8][9][10][11] Vygotsky's important insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experience.[12] Especially since the 1990s, CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide.[13] Elsewhere CHAT has been defined as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans purposefully transform natural and social reality, including themselves, as an ongoing culturally and historically situated, materially and socially mediated process".[14] Core ideas are: 1) humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions; 2) humans make, employ, and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate; and 3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning – and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting.[15][16]

The term CHAT was coined by Michael Cole[17] and popularized by Yrjö Engeström [fi][18] to promote the unity of what, by the 1990s, had become a variety of currents[19] harking back to Vygotsky's work.[20][21]

  1. ^ Or activity theory (AT), as it is also known. Kaptelinin & Nardi 2006, p. 36
  2. ^ Nardi 1996, p. 7 notes that activity theory is a "a research framework and set of perspectives", not a hard and fast methodology or strongly predictive single theory.
  3. ^ Daniels et al. 2010
  4. ^ Kaptelinin & Nardi 2006
  5. ^ Roth & Lee 2007, p. 192: "CHAT was conceived of as a concrete psychology immersed in everyday praxis": "consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do" Nardi 1996, p. 7
  6. ^ In the 1920s till the mid 1930s.
  7. ^ Yasnitsky, A. (2018). Vygotsky: An Intellectual Biography. London and New York: Routledge BOOK PREVIEW
  8. ^ Leontiev may at times also be spelled as Leontyev and Leont'ev.
  9. ^ Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki 1999
  10. ^ It is well known that the Soviet philosopher of psychology S.L.Rubinshtein, independently of Vygotsky's work, developed his own variant of activity as a philosophical and psychological theory. re: V. Lektorsky in Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki 1999, p. 66;Brushlinskii, A. V. 2004 Archived 1 September 2014 at archive.today. Engeström would be happy to also include [in the account of A.T.] reference to Luria, Zinchenko (father, Peter, and son, Vladimir), Elkonin, Davydov and Brushlinsky (as well as to various other figures who have influenced activity-theory in the West, such as Dewey, Mead, and Wittgenstein). Bakhurst 2009, p. 201
  11. ^ Political restrictions in its country of origin (Stalinist Russia) had suppressed the cultural-historical psychology – also known as the Vygotsky School – in the mid-thirties. This meant that the core "activity" concept remained confined to the field of psychology, although Blunden 2011, in "An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity", argues that it has the potential to evolve as a genuinely interdisciplinary concept. See also Nussbaumer 2012, p. 37
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Vyg78 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  13. ^ Kaptelinin & Nardi 2006 Introduction
  14. ^ CHAT explicitly incorporates the mediation of activities by society, which means that it can be used to link concerns normally independently examined by sociologists of education and (social) psychologists. Roth & Lee 2007 and Roth, Radford & Lacroix 2012
  15. ^ Leontiev 1978
  16. ^ Activity Theory in a Nutshell. Ch 3 in Kaptelinin & Nardi 2006.
  17. ^ Cole 1996, p. 105
  18. ^ The activity theoretical framework, as recently as the 1990s, was still referred to as "one of the best kept secrets of academia" Engeström 1993, p. 64; Roth & Lee 2007, p. 188
  19. ^ Prominent among those currents are Cultural-historical psychology, in use since the 1930s, and Activity theory in use since the 1960s.
  20. ^ Stetsenko 2005
  21. ^ Yamagata-Lynch 2007