Cultural Historical Activity Theory and Learning: a relational turn

Anne Edwards

Educational Studies

University of Oxford

Paper presented at the 6th Annual Conference of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, Warwick, 28-30 November 2005

Looking at Learning in TLRP

In 2004, the TLRP Learning Outcomes Thematic Group (LOTG) categorised projects in terms of their approaches to learning. The categorisation was based on the Anderson, Greeno debates on learning as acquisition of knowledge or participation in sets of practices (Anderson, Reder and Simon, 1996; Greeno, 1997). These distinctions were later summarised by Sfard as differences between the metaphors of acquisition and participation (Sfard, 1998). Sfard argued that studies of learning needed to draw on both metaphors. In their summary of the categorisation exercise, James and Brown (2005) observed that more studies seemed to be working with acquisition approaches to learning than with participation, that participation seemed to be largely associated with attitudes and behaviours rather than cognitive outcomes and that many projects incorporated both approaches. Also, as might be expected, the acquisition metaphor was more evident in school and university-based studies and participation in work-based and informal education settings.

In my contribution to the special issue of The Curriculum Journal, which elaborated these analyses (Edwards, 2005a), I wanted to move away from seeing acquisition as synonymous with cognitive and participation with behaviour and instead used Rommetveit’s distinction between two approaches to learning. His was a difference in emphasis between ‘knowledge about’ and a ‘search for meaning’ (Rommetveit, 2003). Rommetveit alerts us to how a search for meaning drives our participation in and action on the world and suggests some limitations in over-emphasising ‘knowledge about’.

I wanted to encourage seeing participation as a search for meaning because, I suggest, to deny the cognitive potential in approaches which focus on action in the world is to underplay their importance in the study of learning. I made my argument through a discussion of some key concepts in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and will pursue that line a little further today.

It was clear from the learning outcomes analysis that one strength of TLRP is its inter-disciplinarity. It allows the Programme to examine how learning can be enhanced by interventions which provide leverage at a range of levels; from system to individual. However, such a multi-layered approach brings new conceptual challenges. One of these, I suggest, is how to reveal the cognitive aspects of behaviour when doing research in the wild (Hutchins, 1995; Bedny and Harris, 2005).

I shall be arguing that CHAT can help in linking the cognitive and behavioural. For example, Vygotsky, Rommetveit and Greeno were working with a version of mind which was outward looking, pattern-seeking, sense-making and acting on the world. For them, consciousness (how we think and act) is revealed in our actions on our worlds and our actions in turn shape our worlds and ways in which we can act in and on them. This is not a static picture of learner and context, but an on-going dynamic which presents huge conceptual challenges for educational research, and which I know are being tackled within the Programme. In this talk I want to do some ground clearing, highlight some of the challenges and offer something to the collective conceptual tool box.

I will start by giving some background on CHAT and some key concepts. I will then identify some of the learning challenges to be faced in the field of professional learning as just one site of learning tackled by the Programme. After that, I will take the relational turn and explore how the concept of relational agency can help address these challenges and will conclude by considering the implications of the concept for CHAT, learning and the TLRP.

The Origins of CHAT

CHAT, as is often currently understood, has developed from two broad strands of work: Russian cultural psychology which started with Vygotsky and North American and European interactionist psychology. They have been brought together by a concern about the separation of mind and world. For example, when the interactionists of the 1960s and 70s were struggling with the limitations of seeing context as simply something to be taken into account, translations of Vygotsky’s work from the late 1920s and early 30s in Moscow began to become available and offered a way forward. Here I shall focus on Vygotsky’s work and what the Russian line in CHAT brings to an understanding of learning and the contexts of learning.

Although ground-breaking, Vygotsky’s work was culturally situated. In his case in post-revolutionary Moscow and much of it during the period in which Stalin took power. His aim reflected his environment and was to create a Marxist psychology through which people were enabled in transforming their material conditions. Shotter explains.

Vygotsky is concerned to study how people, through the use of their own social activities, by changing their own conditions of existence, can change themselves (Shotter, 1993, p. 111)

The transformative intentions of Vygotsky’s psychology and the way in which the world acts back on us will be central themes in this paper. His aim also had clear educational implications. We act on the world using both material and conceptual tools therefore the challenge for educators is to enhance the conceptual capabilities of learners. That is, the job is to move learners from the limitations of heavily situated everyday understandings to what he described as scientific concepts, which were powerful and situation free.

Scientific concepts are acquired over time so that, for example, in mathematics equal addition represents a move to a scientific concept as much as the grasp of a complex proof and both enable us to act more effectively on our world than relying on one to one correspondence. The learning of scientific concepts clearly requires an interventionist pedagogy which is operating with an established body of knowledge.

Vygotsky’s psychology was also shaped by a distinctly Russian understanding of consciousness as collective rather than individual. In overcoming the dualist separation of mind and world he tried to answer the question, how is the collective incorporated into individual consciousness. His answer was through mediation (Vygotsky, 1987). That is, our actions on the world are mediated by the practices and understandings which are salient in our cultures. You will be familiar with the basic mediational triangle which is a slight simplification of Vygotsky’s approach.

Mediational Tools and Artefacts

Acting Subject(s) The Object that is Being Worked on

Figure A A Basic Mediational Triangle

I want to examine the implications of this model. It can be read from at least two angles. Firstly, from an assessment or researcher’s perspective, it illustrates Vygotsky’s great contribution to the study of thinking. That is, our use of mediational means i.e. conceptual and material tools reveals our consciousness. For example, if a child is asked to count the number of chairs in a classroom, she may count each chair, she may see that there are five tables and four chairs at each table and do equal addition or she may multiply four by five. What she does will reveal how she is thinking. It will also reveal her reading of the situation as one in which she needs to demonstrate to her teacher that she knows multiplication.

The model can also be interpreted as an explanation of teaching. Here a teacher works with a learner on a problem. She mediates the learner’s interpretation of the task by introducing culturally appropriate ways of interpreting it and by supplying the resources, ideas or material tools, that are valued culturally as ways of solving the problem. As the learner draws on the tools to work on the problem, the collective understandings of what Vygotsky called the intermental plane, are incorporated into her individual psyche.

This reading implies the outward-looking pattern-seeking mind of Greeno and Rommetveit which I mentioned earlier. However, we also need to remember that the object works back on the subject. So that by understanding the object better, by reconfiguring what Vygotsky described as the intramental plane, a learner i.e. acting subject is repositioned in relation to the object. She sees it differently and externalises that new way of seeing in subsequent actions on it, contributing to and reshaping the intermental plane. In learning there is therefore a dynamic of internalisation i.e. in new understandings and externalisation i.e. bringing to bear these new understanding in new actions on the world which in turn help shape the world.

Although the process I’ve just described involves the idea of object-oriented action, Vygotsky’s main interest was mediation and the enhancing of the conceptual tools available to people as they worked on the world to improve it. This was a dangerously individualistic bourgeois line to take in Stalin’s Moscow and it became an increasingly uncomfortable place for him.

Indeed his colleague Leont’ev was obliged to leave Moscow in 1930 and take his team to Karkov. There they shifted their attention to a more acceptable focus on the object and its cultural construction. From the raft of work coming from that group which eventually developed into activity theory I will focus here only on object motive. Leont’ev explained it as follows.

The main thing which distinguishes one activity from an another, however, is the difference in their objects. It is exactly the object of an activity that gives it its determined direction. According to the terminology I have proposed, the object of an activity is its true motive.

(Leont’ev, 1978, p. 62)

One example of object motive that Leont’ev used was that of traders in gem stones who work with gem stones very differently from, for example, how geologists do. Each group would see different meanings held in the stones and the social practices of the activity system would differ accordingly. The idea of object motive importantly recognises that our actions are elicited by our interpretations of the object and by the ways of engaging with the object that are possible in different sets of socially and historically situated practices. Leont’ev’s work takes us to the idea that a collective activity shapes the object and possible responses to it. Though Vygotsky too started to work with the idea of a leading activity just before his death.

Engeström’s development of activity theory from the more descriptive approaches of Leont’ev to recapture the Marxist transformative intentions of Vygotsky are becoming increasingly familiar. His is a methodology which aims at changing systems through provoking a collective reinterpretation of the object. As a result of these reinterpretations a system is reconfigured as participants reposition themselves in relation to the object and to each other. In Engeström’s work we can see the importance of externalisation as part of the engine that changes the system (Engeström, 1999a and b).

The changing focuses of CHAT have produced slightly different approaches to how learning might be supported. They have been summarised by Lave and Wenger (1991) and, in brief, are as follows.

·  A ‘scaffolding’ interpretation where the concern is to move the learner with help to a new understanding.

·  A ‘cultural’ interpretation where the difference is seen in terms of the distance between everyday and scientific understandings which is bridged by instruction.

·  A ‘collectivist’ or ‘societal’ interpretation, which highlights the difference between current understandings and new forms of collectively generated solutions to the contradictions embedded in current understandings.

The first two interpretations are located within pedagogical relationships and focus on internalisation of the culture we inhabit. The third version, associated with Engeström, is more open-ended, deals with externalisation and allows for the generation of new understandings for new problems. Because of its origins in the object-oriented activity theory of Leont’ev rather than the mediation-focused psychology of Vygotsky, changes in interpretation of the object are seen in terms of tension and contradictions within multi-voiced systems. For Engeström, systems can be seen as open-ended learning zones and distinguished by their capacity to reveal and work on contradictions, between for example, object and tool or in interpretations of the object.

CHAT is a developing theoretical field, and these approaches to learning reveal some of its limitations. The first two versions are strong on mediation and entry into a culture, but can’t help us to deal with problems that have not yet been encountered. As ways of thinking about learning, they may aim at empowerment, but they can also be inherently conservative. The final collectivist version does, with its emphasis on externalisation and contestation of the nature of object, allow us to see how we might work on culturally new problems and generate new solutions. But the learning that is captured is at the level of the system and the emphasis on multi-voicedness and contradiction as the engine of change plays down any understanding of mediation in relation to the externalisation that is occurring. Later, in the final part of the paper, I shall be arguing that the individual needs to be connected analytically with the collective through micro-level analyses of the relational.

Some Current Learning Challenges

I have already suggested that a major challenge is to reinsert the cognitive into analyses of behaviour and have proposed that a CHAT framework can help in two ways. Firstly, it argues that thinking is revealed in our use of conceptual tools and therefore our use of language as we act on the world. Secondly, an analysis of interpretations of the object can link conceptual tools to the affordances for interpretation and action that have been culturally constructed within a setting over time.

The connection between thought, action and context has been an enduring challenge for psychology and has been tackled within the discipline from William James onwards. Today I want to look at some related and current challenges that a theory of learning in the field of education needs to be able to address. They are:

·  Working on new problems

·  Working with instability and uncertainty

·  Distributed knowledge and expertise

In examining these challenges and how CHAT might help in working on them, I shall begin to point towards the relational turn I shall finally propose.