Learning Activity: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Agency

Abstract

The theory and practice of activity theory developed in Russian psychological and pedagogical thought over the course of more than forty years. Most of the founders of activity theory have recently begun to question and articulate more closely the key meanings of this powerful approach that has shaped the terrain of innovative psychological research and educational reform in many parts of the former Soviet Union. The conceptual framework of cultural-historical psychology of L. S. Vygotsky's activity theory (CHAT) with its emphasis on the "interrelationship between the development of the mind and its embodiment in social interaction" (Eminovich and Lima, 1995, p. 375), culture and cognition, agent and mediational means, captured Western psychological thought and influenced ongoing research in the fields of anthropology, art, literature, sociolinguistics, and education in Europe and America. Although it would be productive to explore the nature of this type of appeal of CHAT for research in Europe and the United States, the focus of this issue of the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology is learning activity and the notion of agency within it.