Chapter 19: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

Cultural-historical psychology, as a theory of psychology, was founded by L. S. Vygotsky at the end of the 1920s and developed by his students and followers in Eastern Europe and worldwide. Cultural psychology, an interdisciplinary field, emerged at the interface of anthropology, psychology, and linguistics. Its aim, in part, has been that of examining ethnic and cultural sources of psychological diversity in relation to emotional functioning, moral reasoning, social cognition and human development (Holland & Cole, 1995). A central thesis of cultural psychology, originating in the Russian cultural-historical school of thought (Valisner, 1988) is “that structure and development of human psychological processes emerge through culturally mediated, historically developing, practical activity” (Cole, 1996, p. 108). In his conceptualizing a second cultural psychology, Cole elected to bring cultural artifacts, both ideal and material, to the foreground of understanding learning. In this perspective, artifacts are viewed as products of human history, situated socially and culturally: culture is moved to the center in relation to artifact-mediated action within human activity systems. Explicating his theoretical perspective of cultural psychology, Cole was concerned with a conception of culture adequate to the theories and practices related to an artifact mediated perspective of learning as activity, adopting an activity theory framework to further elaborate his cultural-historical notion of learning.