Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as a Research Lens in Studying Public Education

• In Event: Westin Roundtable Session 4

Abstract

This paper highlights the affordances of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a qualitative research lens when studying complex systems. Two specific features of this paper are (a) the focus on the object of the activity system, and the ‘contradiction of control’, and (b) how three activity systems can be used as unit of analysis to highlight systemically embeddedness and longitudinal nature of phenomena. The authors use a South African example of how public schooling fails to foster self-directed learning, and show how CHAT provides a robust meta-theoretical framework in qualitative research.

Authors

• Josef De Beer, North-West University

• Elsa Mentz, North-West University