Yrjo Engestrom – författare

Activity theory is an interdisciplinary approach to human sciences that originates in the cultural-historical psychology school, initiated by Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria. It takes the object-oriented, artifact-mediated collective activity system as its unit of analysis, thus bridging the gulf between the individual subject and the societal structure. This 1999 volume includes 26 chapters on activity theory by authors from ten countries. In Part I of the book, central theoretical issues are discussed from different points of view. Some topics addressed in this part are epistemology, methodology, and the relationship between biological and cultural factors. Part II is devoted to the acquisition and development of language. This part includes a chapter that analyzes writing activity in Japanese classrooms, and a case study of literacy skills of a man with cerebral palsy. Part III contains chapters on play, learning, and education, and Part IV addresses the meaning of technology and the development of work activities. The final part covers issues of therapy and addiction.

This book opens up new theoretical perspectives and practical possibilities to analyze the learning opportunities emerging in the transitional zones between educational institutions and workplaces. International contributors draw on a range of ideas developed within constructivistic, socio-cultural and activity theory and focus in different ways on the processes of transition, transfer and boundary crossing as central to learning, especially in vocational and professional education contexts. The book begins with four chapters which locate the renewed interest in transfer and the emerging interest in boundary crossing in the context of knowledge society in terms of the following: the historical development of learning theories, the theoretical advances made in socio-cultural approaches as regards learning, transfer and boundary crossing, and sociological approaches to links between school and workplace learning. Part II contains seven chapters that present studies on learning and transfer in different domains of vocational and professional education. Part III presents three studies that describe and analyze learning in workplaces. The chapters of these three parts report on a range of empirical and developmental studies which have developed new 'tools for learning and transfer' in vocational education. The book ends with an epilogue consisting of a critical reflection on the earlier chapters in relation to how they approach two key transfer issues - the relationship between school knowledge and the knowledge acquired in working life, and the relationship between transfer and boundary crossing at the individual and collective levels. The chapters of this book are based on original research undertaken by members and invited experts of a European COST Action A 11 Working Group 2 which includes researchers from twelve different countries.

This volume brings together articles from the Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition that are important benchmarks in the recent history of research and theory on the cultural and contextual foundations of human development. The central theme of this discussion can be posed as a question: how shall we develop a psychology that takes as its starting point the actions of people participating in routine, culturally organized activities? The discussion is organized in terms of a set of overarching themes of importance to psychologists and other social scientists: The nature of context; experiments as contexts; cultural historical theories of culture, context, and development; the analysis of classroom settings as a social important context of development, the psychological analysis of activity in situ, and questions of power and discourse.