Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 18:12:45 +0300 (EET DST)
Subject: activity


Lisa,

here's a forwarded post on some of the basic themes or
principles (?) of 'Cultural-Historical Activity Theory'..

I don't know whether all those people really accept all that
but might give you some picture of their point of view.

Basically activity-list people are - I guess, I'm not on
that list - psychologists and people who do research on
education. Their theoretical interests concern Russian
cultural-historical school (Vygotsky, Leontyev etc). It
seems that there is strong trend to consider culture as
something learned - learning seems to be basic viewpoint of
some of activity people (Yrjö Engeström, for example),
learning and activity.

I'll forward you some posts if you're interested in that
stuff.

Yours, Jukka

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 09:48:20 -0500
From: pprior-AT-ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: xmca-AT-weber.ucsd.edu
To: xmca-AT-weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: CHAT core
Resent-Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 07:48:40 -0700 (PDT)
Resent-From: xmca-AT-weber.ucsd.edu

There was a thread many posts back now where several people were talking
about what might be the core themes or beliefs of CHAT.  I just picked up
Jerome Bruner's book _The Culture of Education__, where he starts out with
a discussion of 9 tenets of a cultural pschology of education.

I'm curious how others would react to this list from a CHAT perspective.
They are (roughly summarized):

perspective (all meanings and events are relative to perspective),

constraints (imposed by our biological inheritance and by the symbolic
systems available--the symbolic however also functions to transcend
biological limitations),

constructivism (we construct realities, largely on the basis of tradition
and our culture's toolkit for ways of thinking),

interaction (development and learning happen in interactions where
intersubjectivity is fundamtental),

externalization (as a collective function of culture, as critical to
forming identity and community, and as a central resource in performing
actions--it seems here that Bruner's examples all focus on externalization
of symbolic activity in texts, laws, etc. as opposed to in machines and
instruments),

instrumentalism (education has consequences in the lives of individuals and
in institutions and culture--here he argues that education is always
political)

institution (that education is institutionalized and takes on distinctly
institutional characteristics--here he draws on Bourdieu's notion of
distinctions)

identity and self-esteem (education is about the formation of identities
and self-esteem--a combination of efficacy and evaluation--and education is
in competition with other cultural "markets" as a potential source of
self-esteem)

and finally and most importantly, narrative (the fundamental mode of
thought through which people make sense of their worlds, themselves, and
their communities)
________________
Paul Prior
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
p-prior-AT-uiuc.edu



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