Activity Theory, targets, The Patients Association, NEETs - and what we need to do to promote real learning

This might be a bit complicated :-).

What I want to try to do is to pull together several very different ideas to show why I believe that the target culture actually prevents us from promoting real learning. I will spread what I have to say over two or three separate blog posts, starting today with the theoretical bit.

 

Fig 1. Simplified diagram of Activity System

Activity Theory was first developed by Aleksei Leontiev, a Soviet psychologist, and then taken further in recent years by Scandanavian academics, notably Yrjö Engeström. At the heart of Activity Theory is the idea of analysing human behaviour in terms of communal work activity. (Interestingly, Activity theory is used both by educational psychologists and by those studying human-computer action so it is highly relevant to those of us who make our living in the field of e-learning - but that is beside the point here.)

Engeström used the idea of an 'Activity System' to focus on how human activity works, and fig. 1 shows a simplified version of this: the subject is an individual or group engaged in a a communal/work activity, the object is

the 'raw material' or 'problem space' at which the activity is directed and which is molded and transformed into outcomes

Yrjö Engeström

and the 'cultural tools' can be both physical tools and any other artefacts, physical or abstract, that the subject uses in working on the object.

So here's a simple example. The Activity System for a group of medieval stonemasons building a cathedral would look something like this:

 

Fig 2. One example of an activity system

Note that the 'tools' include not only physical tools, but also more abstract things like plans and the stonemasons' guilds, with their systems of training and cultural expectations.

And if we apply the same idea to a present-day school college or university, we might come up with something like Fig. 3:

Fig 3. Is this the activity system within a school, college or university?

At this stage you may well be asking the question: so what? (I certainly would.) How, you may ask, does all this help us to understand what is happening within our schools, colleges and universities.

I will try to provide an answer (and a rather disturbing one, I believe) in my next post.