Activity, Development, Intervention (ADI)
The working domain Activity and Development (ADI) stresses developmental processes at both individual and collective levels with a specific emphasis on the social, cultural and historical formation of the human mind on the one hand, and the dynamics of socio-mental dialectics within continuously transforming societal contexts on the other hand.
1. Conceiving learning beyond the boundary of the individual’s skin
In the MA multi-LEARN programme we take a critical attitude towards mind-body dualism when trying to understand processes of knowing, reasoning or learning. Traditionally, cognitive processes, or educationally desirable skills and competencies were studied as psychological attributes being possessed by and residing in our heads; social, cultural, or technological factors were seen only as external sources of stimulation. But once reasoning, speaking, imagining, counting and so forth “ are examined in real-life problem-solving situations and in other encounters with the social and technological surrounds, a rather different phenomenon emerges: people appear to think in conjunction or partnership with others and with the help of culturally provided tools and implements ” (Salomon, 1993, xii-xiii).
Accordingly, our focus of analysis is no longer restricted to the individual subject endowed with specific (mental) capacities or abilities but extended to the multiple modes/ways in which human thinking and knowing occurs within culturally organized forms of activity (Cole 1995, 51) or, as suggested by Wertsch (1991, 119), to the “person-acting-with-mediational-means”. Cultural-historical approaches, as Nardi & Kaptelinin (2006, 9) argue, ground analysis on “the DOING of the activity in a rich matrix of PEOPLE AND ARTEFACTS” or in other terms, on what people DO in culturally mediated and historically evolving practical activity.
2. Analysing development as en-acting tools
Humans differ from other species in that they invent and use tools as part of their material, linguistic, discursive, or performative modes of acting, thereby providing means to actively transform and adapt to the conditions of existence in which they find themselves. Taking speech as an example, we all acknowledge that this cultural tool serves to shape opportunities for acting and thinking but, in turn, is also continuously transformed by those who use it. Consequently, the AD domain asserts a nondeterministic account of development in the sense that humans and the environment mutually constitute each other so that the environment cannot be specified independently of the persons who live in it. “ The dual process of shaping and being shaped through culture implies that humans inhabit ‘intentional’ (constituted) worlds within which the traditional dichotomies of subject and object, person and environment, and so on cannot be analytically separated and temporally ordered into independent and dependent variables” (Cole, 1996, 103).
Cultural artefacts allow people to engage in joint, tool-mediated activity with other members of a community and to co-develop specific practices, social divisions of labour, sophisticated rule systems, and widespread funds of knowledge over the course of their history. These communities are highly concerned with transmitting these collaborative achievements through specific practices and artefacts from one generation to the next, thus binding generations together into a community-over-time. By appropriating this cultural heritage, the next generation is enabled to continue the work their ancestors bequeathed to them without having to begin anew. This transmission-appropriation cycle has to be understood as an ongoing and dynamic re-construction process of a community’s motives, practices and cultural tools.
Actually, on the individual level , the joint activities in which humans participate and the historically developed artefacts they deliberately draw upon, react on them by altering their consciousness, defined here as the enacted capacity for attention, intention, reasoning, speaking, remembering, imagining, etc. A thorough understanding of the human mind, as aimed at by the Master programme, has to interrogate the leading activities with the related socio-genetic processes in which people participate from infancy to adulthood channeling the development of their mental processes, abilities and motives. ‘Higher’ mental functions, as our most distinctive trait, are not biologically given but socially constructed within joint, meaningful activity. According to Vygotsky (1981) two lines, the natural and the cultural plane of development, interweave with one another, like the fibres of a rope, to form a continuous thread of socio-biological formation of a subject’s personality.
Intermingling these two planes of development within multiple everyday activities delineates development further as an open-systemic phenomenon in which “novelty is constantly in the process of being created” (Valsiner 2000, 54).
On the social/societal level , we have to acknowledge that the creative re-construction of enacted ways of doing takes place in the context of dynamically transforming high-technology societies where e.g. information, communication and multimedia technologies are raising an increasing amount of challenging issues about how and why individuals and communities transform or reveal themselves as resistant to changes.
Furthermore and referring specifically to the MA students’ preliminary case descriptions, these contexts are increasingly shaped by linguistic and cultural diversity. In conjunction with ongoing changes in the social, economic, political domains, people have to create suitable tools for acting in a world of conflicting tendencies where
- demands of modernisation are clashing with efforts to preserve historically developed practices and cultural heritage;
- a broad and active co-construction of meaning making comes into conflict with forces to reproduce given entities;
- the tendencies of homogenization, identity construction or nation-state adherence collide with claims for social diversity, hybridization and the management of heterogeneity;
- individualisation processes are incompatible with an overall globalization policy;
- a narrow definition of culture is deliberately used for public, social and political purposes (education, language use or history writing) impeding processes of cultural pluralism and diversification.
3. Activity Theory as analytical framework for learning and development
An activity-theoretical framework apprehends development by interrogating how something new emerges from the inner contradictions of the old.
Tensions and contradictions are subsequently understood as the driving force of qualitative changes in activities over time. The latter do not emerge out of nowhere but rely on the lore of language, equipment, institutions, conventions… In order to understand an activity, we have to uncover its contextual and temporal situatedness and interconnections as well.
Activity systems are sensitive to change through constant interactions among their basic constituents on the one hand, and through horizontal stimulations across their linguistic, cultural, professional and societal boundaries on the other hand.
For Engeström (1987), expanding the object of an activity is a powerful generator of change, unlocking in consequence a range of extended possibilities and further actions. The object may be altered:
- on the socio-spatial plane, increasing in size and embracing more actors;
- according to the temporal axis, spanning a longer period of time and becoming more durable;
- according to the ethical-political dimension so that possible consequences of the new object also entail new kinds of responsibility.
For instance, a workplace or teaching team may relate its current practice of communicating, organizing, teaching, problem solving, etc. to emerging ideas about a future transformed practice. The underlying tensions may be generated through:
- innovations, where actors invent action sequences that go beyond the standard procedure in order to achieve something more than the routine outcome;
- open “dis-coordinations” or “disturbancies” of interaction in the sense of deviations from the normal scripted course of events in a well defined work process (in the form of procedures, plans, explicit rules or tacitly assumed traditions);
- latent or hidden ruptures of intersubjective understanding, or
- dilemmas within thought and discourse (Engestroem,1992, 19)
Co-constructing a shared and “expanded” object of activity will be a more or less conflictual process, which will enable the group to transform their activity into a new shared activity in interaction with other related activity systems.
Furthermore and according to the above-mentioned unit of analysis (“the doing of the activity in a rich matrix of people and artefacts”), the Master programme seminars will encourage the participants to jointly develop a rich methodological toolkit for investigating processes within the practices of groups, teams, organizations in the pursuit of the ‘object’ of their activity at both macro and micro levels. This collaborative work will incorporate research methods such as:
- the analysis of discourse;
- the use of audio and video recordings to document thinking-in-situ and acting-in-the–world;
- participant observation and interviewing;
- conversational analysis to draw attention to the way in which individuals’ responses fit into the activity that they help to constitute;
- interventionist research, such as developmental work research, where the intervention of the researcher is itself part of the research;
- double stimulation approaches in order to investigate the potential for prospective development thus determining the participant’s zone of proximal development.
References
Cole, M. (1995). “Culture and cognitive development: from cross-cultural research to creating systems of cultural mediation”. Culture & Psychology, vol. 1:25-54.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: an activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Engeström, Y. (1992). Interactive expertise. Studies in Distributed Working Intelligence. University of Helsinki. Department of Education. Research bulletin 83.
Nardi, B., & Kaptelinin, V. (2006). Acting with technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Salomon, G. (ed.) (1993). Distributed Cognitions. Psychological and educational considerations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Valsiner, J. (2000). Culture and human development. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In: Wertsch, J.V. (Ed.) The concept of activity in Soviet Psychology pp.144–188. Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe).
Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the mind:a sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
Scientific coordinator of the ADI-domain: Prof. Dr. Charles MAX.