Critical Perspectives on Activity
Explorations Across Education, Work, and Everyday Life

This book analyzes human learning and development understood through the concept of 'activity'.

Peter Sawchuk (Edited by), Newton Duarte (Edited by), Mohamed Elhammoumi (Edited by)

9780521849999, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 January 2006

312 pages, 15 b/w illus. 4 tables
23.4 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.546 kg

The last two decades have seen an international explosion of interest in theories of mind, culture, and activity. This unique collection is the first to explicitly reach back to the tradition's original critical impulse within which the writings of Karl Marx played such a central role. Each author pushes this impulse further to address leading contemporary questions. It includes a diverse array of international scholars working from the fields of education, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, communications, industrial relations, and business studies. Broken into three main sections - education, work, and everyday life - each chapter builds from an analysis of practice and learning as social cultural participation and historical change in relation to the concept of activity, contradiction, and struggle. This book offers insight into an important complex of overlapping practices and institutions to shed light on broader debates over such matters as the 'knowledge economy' and 'lifelong learning'.

Part I: 1. Introduction: exploring activity across education, work, and everyday life Peter H. Sawchuk, Newton Duarte and Mohamed Elhammoumi
Part II. Critical Perspectives on Theory: 2. Is there a Marxist psychology? Mohamed Elhammoumi
3. The cultural-historical activity theory: some aspects of development Joachim Lompscher
4. Epistemological scepticism, complacent irony: investigations concerning the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty Maria Celia Marcondes de Moraes
Part II. Education: 5. The importance of play in pre-school education: naturalisation versus Marxist analysis Alessandra Arce
6. Estranged labor learning Ray McDermott and Jean Lave
7. Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions: a CHAT analysis of college teachers Helena Worthen and Joe Berry
Part III. Work: 8. Contradictory class relations in work and learning: some resources for hope D. W. Livingstone
9. From labor process to activity theory Paul S. Adler
10. Values, rubbish and workplace learning Yrjö Engeström
Part IV. Everyday Life: 11. Education as mediation between the individual's everyday life and the historical construction of society and culture by humankind Newton Duarte
12. Activity and power: everyday life and development of working-class groups Peter H. Sawchuk.

Subject Areas: Education [JN], Psychology [JM], Sociology & anthropology [JH]