A Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Approach for the Design of a Qualitative Methodology in Science Educational Research

Studying the Activity From a Relational Ontology

The first element we will consider is the concept of activity. Despite being the central concept of CHAT, this concept is not unequivocally defined in the literature (Slobodchikov, 2001) being related by different authors to both ontology and epistemology (Miettinen, 2006). In our view, a CHAT perspective is better adopted by stressing its ontological character. We take activity to be more than a relation among moments or elements of the activity system. We see activity as an ontological unity of significance rather than as an extrinsic relation between individual subjects and their context. To us, activity must be seen, in line with Marxist and Vygotskian tradition, as a key category to transcend dualism by intrinsically relating consciousness and the physical world, the individual and society. However, some authors have argued that CHAT often includes a dualistic perspective which would not agree with is Vygotskian roots (Veresov, 2016). In our view, the root of this issue lies in the conceptualisation of consciousness. Despite their materialist roots, neither Vygotsky nor Leont’ev presented thought or consciousness as pertaining to the field of neurology or the natural sciences. We do not see this because of the knowledge at their time, but rooted in the importance of the social in their thinking. Therefore, without having to resort to a monist view, as the one espoused by Vygotsky, we can escape dualism by understanding consciousness to be connected but neither reducible to, nor an emergent of, physical systems. Therefore, we take a (new) realist ontological perspective to underpin our use of activity theory (DeLanda, 2006; Gabriel, 2015; Harman, 2018). These considerations justify our approach to the study of the subject of the activity.

Since activity always involves physical objects and consciousness, this implies, according to our ontological stance, that activity is neither something that can be fully determined by the theories of natural sciences nor explained by post-modern relativism. Therefore, while we see the physical world as best described by natural sciences, we argue that consciousness is outside the ontology of natural sciences. Hence, what we can say about phenomena involving human consciousness has to consider this ontological characteristic, and this will entail the use of particular methodologies which must consider the actual existence and effect of the out-of-mind objects and, therefore, cannot only focus on cognitive phenomena.

Because of the description of activity systems in CHAT, the ontology we propose is relational. We consider relations among different parts of the activity system as extrinsic to the definition of these parts while being connected to their changes. The importance of relations is seen both in the relations established within the activity system and in the cultural-historical relations that connect the activity and its participants with a wider social context. This relational character is also in keeping with the transformative character of CHAT. Activity itself implies the irreducible interrelation of consciousness and physical characteristics of external reality in changing one another. This relational character connects with methodological choices.

The Need for a Point of Entry

Our ontological choices commit us to take into consideration the complexity of actors involved in the activity. This poses the methodological question of how to justify the study of particular elements of an activity system that the theory considers a unit of analysis. To do so, following Marxist theory, we must define a point of entry. No point of entry can be considered a priori as being more important than any other, but the existing literature can suggest suitable points of entry on connection to the research questions. We must present our point of entry as contingent on our research interests and consider our results critically to not disregard the other processes included in the activity system, which might also be suitable points of entry.

Transformations and the Role of Time

Activities imply changes, and changes imply time. It is essential, hence, to consider the role of time in researching the subjects, the objects, their mutually defining relations, the activities within which those relations are contextualised, and the world(s) transformed by these elements and relations. It is also essential to understand how all these components are intrinsically, though not essentially, defined as well by a historical social network, that is, existing in a time frame that goes beyond the time frame of the activity being studied. We must consider both time frames in CHAT research methodology.

The foundation role of activity and the stress on transformation requires a mechanism for explaining how transformations, changes in the activity systems, come about. CHAT uses the concept of contradiction referring to conflicts within and between elements of the activity system, between systems of activity (Engeström, 1987). These contradictions manifest as tensions within and between activity systems. The importance of transformation in the Marxist tradition underpinning CHAT has led a considerable amount of CHAT research to adopt the view that it cannot dissociate studying a system of activity from bringing about change to that system.

While we agree CHAT research is oriented towards change, we consider that the historical and cultural timeframes involved in activity systems make it relevant to study different temporal points and constituent aspects of the system of activity. Hence, we pose that transformation can be seen as an axiological characteristic rather than an epistemological one. This means that transformation is more fundamentally bonding to the goals of the researchers and less necessarily connected to the praxis of immediate research. By taking this position, we are not assuming an absolute value connected to change, but change as a value related to social practice (Fleischer, 1968); change is a value because transformations of the system of activity are positively significant for human beings. Our axiological perspective allows us to consider change a fundamental characteristic of the dialectical nature of society while recognising the individuals’ subjective autonomy (Fleischer, 1968). Therefore, our proposal allows CHAT research to study distinct moments related to a particular transformation instead of focussing only on the study interventions aimed at bringing about a transformation, and provides a space to discuss transformation in relation to individuals’ subjective perspectives.

Collecting Data to Study the Immediate Outcome

Within CHAT, the outcome is understood as the transformed reality, the results and products (Leont’ev, 1974), which can be of an ideal nature, material or both (Postholm, 2015). Activity emerges as a process that effects a reciprocal transformation between the subject-object poles (Leont’ev, 1974). From these considerations and the plane of the activity selected for our study, we understood that the transformed reality would be twofold: the teachers’ professional development in terms of the improved competences in using IWB and laptops for teaching (participant teachers were novices in its use at the beginning of the study) as well as the students learning of science contents and competences. These outcomes, which we would relate with the motive and the object of the activity, result from a series of actions and operations which make possible the process of internalisation that is needed in attaining their respective learning for both teachers and students. Thus, as described by Engeström et al. (1999), internalisation of these practices becomes the dominant form of learning and development from the CHAT paradigm. We placed the focus of our study on the teachers as the subject of the activity system, and their professional development as the outcome. Even though we could analyse, to some extent, students’ learning through our inferences of their social interactions in the classroom, we did not study it explicitly. The teachers’ mediated actions on the students made up a central element of their professional development process. Hence, we studied that professional development as the outcome of the activity system inferring teachers’ developed competences related to the use of IWB and laptops from the study of classroom teaching-learning processes, as well as through teachers’ interviews.

To study the outcome, we considered intermediate transformations related to the organised tasks students carried out in the science lessons led by the teacher, which correspond to the actions that together make up the teaching-learning sequences. These actions, which we selected as our point of entry, are mainly developed in the social plane, which is the plane encompassing the interactions between teacher and students and between students (Vygotsky, 1978). Actions in the social plane can be observed in a reasonable amount of time. Consequently, we considered direct observation the most appropriate method to gather data about the outcome at this level. This method has been also frequently used in CHAT research for the study of the outcome in classroom contexts, as in Barab et al. (2002) or Demiraslan & Koçak Usluel (2008).

We videotaped different lessons for each participant teacher to study the development of the outcome within a sequence of a significant time period. We chose video recordings as the primary source of data since they would allow to reproduce actions and operations with IWB and laptops after the observation both regarding the verbal classroom dialogue and the non-verbal communication in the lesson. This information would also allow us to infer the situated meanings of the elements of the activity and their relationship with each other, as it is described below.

We placed two cameras in the classroom, following Luff & Heath (2012) recommendations. One camera was placed at the front of the classroom, recording a fixed and wide perspective in which all participants appeared (students and teacher). The wide approach provided information about the classroom setting and the outcome in relation to the mediation of the division of labour, community and rules, for example, providing context to explaining why the teacher interrupted one-to-one dialogues with students to draw the attention of the less concentrated students while students were working in groups with their laptops (picture on the left, Figure 5). A second camera was at the back of the classroom and the researcher moved it to follow the movements of the teacher. This follow-up camera provided a detailed perspective of the teachers’ practices with IWB and laptops, and the created artifacts with the tools (e.g. productions with the IWB or laptops), as it is exemplified in the right picture in Figure 5, where the teacher is discussing with two students about the work they have been doing in their group. Therefore, the follow-up camera provided detailed information about the outcome related to the subject–tool–object relationship. This method appeared to be easily adaptable to the different classroom settings studied, where students’ tables and IWB had been arranged differently.

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Figure 5.

Examples of the use of the two cameras in the study of the outcome of the activity recording simultaneously a wide perspective (left) and follow-up perspective (right).

Collecting Data to Study the Outcome From a Historical Perspective

History is another relevant aspect to consider when studying the outcome in CHAT-based research, as explained above. Historical analyses need to focus on units of manageable size (Engeström et al., 1999). However, if the unit of analysis is the individual, or the individually constructed situation, history is reduced to ontogeny or biography; if the unit is the culture of the society, history becomes very general or endlessly complex. Therefore, Engeström et al. (1999) recommend taking the collective activity system as the unit which would make history become both manageable and step beyond the confines of individual biography. From this perspective, in our study, the historical analysis drew from the study of previous configurations of the system of the activity at the school or administrative planes. These planes acted as the ‘legacy’ leading and explaining the present activity system in which the classroom plane would be included and be part of it, following the representation in Figure 4.

We carried out an analysis, involving a deep study of the literature, of previous large-scale introductions of digital technologies into the Catalan educational system and their reported consequences for teaching practices. Again, although we placed the focus of our study on the teaching practices mediated by IWB and laptops occurring within a science lesson, this historical analysis contributed to assign meaning to the present outcome and the entire system. Together with the results of the analysis of the studied activity system for the six participant teachers, it contributed to outline different guidelines and recommendations to better integrate IWB and laptops for science teaching purposes. As these guidelines were distributed and published at the end of the research, we understood they could subsequently lead to transformations in other teachers’ activity systems.

Collecting Data About Actions: Subject, Tool and Object

The choice of the outcome determines the plane of focus of the activity system. In our case, since the outcome is the professional development of science teachers, we choose the teacher to be the subject. Therefore, we will choose as the point of entry one of the relational processes of the activity system connected to the teacher. Considering that classroom practice is key to professional development, we have chosen ‘classroom activities’, which in CHAT can be seen as related actions that bring about the activity of teaching and learning science, as the point of entry. To study these actions, we need to collect data about the subject (teacher), mediating artifacts (IWB and laptops), the object and their relationships. Acknowledging the difficulty in the definition of the object, since our study focused on the teacher and the development of their teaching competences, we only studied the object of the activity in relation to the development of teachers’ competences to teach science, connected to the teachers’ goals of organising and leading different learning tasks in each science lesson. Learning tasks became concrete in their interactions with students and in the work they were asked to do in the classroom. Hence, students, in relation to their leaning of particular science competences, were the object of the activity system.

Gathering Data About Teachers as the Subject of the Activity

Gathering data about teachers, as the subjects of the activity, has been traditionally described as studying their attributes (Engeström et al., 1999). These attributes have been characterised in different ways as referring to the subject’s knowledge, beliefs, perspectives, attitudes and/or ideas, as well as affects, emotions and motivations (Karasavvidis, 2009; Roth et al., 2009). The traditional CHAT paradigm considers that these attributes are shaped by the outcome of the action (Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004), but it does not elaborate on how subjects could also have agency in shaping them. To address this gap, we propose addressing teachers’ attributes from the lenses of identity as a complementary framework. We take the definition of an identity as the set of meanings that define who one is (the self) when one occupies a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person (Burke & Stets, 2009, p. 3). Although other definitions of identity can be found in the literature, from our perspective the proposal of Burke & Stets (2009) improves the study of the subject within the CHAT ontology for two reasons: First, because it shares some foundations with CHAT being a relational paradigm. Second, because it provides an ontology of the subject that better accounts for its relationships with the community in the activity system. Interactions between the subject and other elements of the activity system facilitate inferring the attributes of these identities but are not intrinsic to their definition, which is more coherent with the ontology we propose. Hence, identity theory acknowledges the agency of the subject in shaping their identities: an identity is composed of different processes dealing with meanings within the context and within the self which operate in a homeostatic way to maintain perceived self-meanings within a certain range (Stets & Serpe, 2013). This framework is also coherent with our vision of educational processes, in which the teacher has an active role in organising and orchestrating their internal resources (pedagogical content knowledge, beliefs, etc.) towards the object to produce a desired outcome as the activity is developed, in line with Stetsenko & Arievitch (2004).

In our research, we acknowledged the existence of two main identities for each teacher (as subjects of the activity): role identities and personal identities. Teachers’ role identities are defined as the internalised meanings of a social role that individuals apply to themselves (Burke & Stets, 2009). In our context, role identities accounted for teachers’ expectations tied to their social position (i.e. ‘being the ICT coordinator’) which guided their attitudes and behaviour, and were intricately linked to specific performances (e.g. teachers’ apologising for the lack of technical maintenance of the IWB or laptops) (Burke & Stets, 2009). From the CHAT perspective, understanding teachers’ role identities was relevant since these identities provided evidence of the relationships with, and between, other elements in their activity system. Teachers’ personal identities, defined as the traits which make the teachers see themselves as a unique and distinct individual different from others (Burke & Stets, 2009), were also singled out in some responses and interactions within the outcome that went beyond teachers’ role identities. For example, these personal identities included traits as being ‘ICT-reluctant’ or ‘ICT-lover’ (mainly made explicit in the interactions with the researcher).

In identity theory, the basic process of identity operation is identity-verification (Stets & Serpe, 2013), where the subjects make the meanings about themselves in the situation (inputs) correspond to the set of meanings defining the attributes of each identity of the subject (their identity standard) – For example, acting as a caring teacher in a situation. When teachers’ identities experience difficulties to achieve congruity between perceptions of the environment (inputs) and the identity standard, stress or distress arises in the teacher (Stets & Serpe, 2013). From our CHAT perspective, these interruptions, manifested in teachers’ stresses, are signals of tensions between the subject and other elements of the activity system, or internal tensions within the subject, as it has been described by authors such as Engeström et al. (1999). For example, in our research, we observed that some teachers who described themselves as constructivists refused to use the IWB in their lessons, contrary to what educational guidelines from the administration were fostering, as they felt the IWB forced them to act as if they were transmissive teachers. Hence, we interpreted that these teachers’ stress indicated a tension between meanings attributed to IWB by teachers (as the tool mediating the activity), teachers’ beliefs about themselves (as the subjects of the action), and their ideal of how teaching should be (attributes of the subject of the activity).

For these reasons, when studying the subject, one of our principal aims was to identify those moments of distress and, together with the subject, interpret them as a proxy to understand their activity system and the relationships between elements. To make this reconstruction, we used one-to-one interviews to gather data and record them in audio. Other CHAT-based researchers characterising the subject’s identity have frequently used one-to-one interviews (Nguyen & Yang, 2018; Wade-Jaimes et al., 2019). We structured our interviews in different sections aimed at providing information to (i) study the subjects’ attributes and reconstruct teachers’ different identities, and (ii) identify possible tensions in the rest of the elements of the system of the activity perceived by the subject by recognising the stress derived from interruptions in teachers’ identity-verification processes.

In the interviews, we knew that a new activity (research) was being undertaken different from teaching, in which the teacher and the researcher developed different roles than the ones developed in the lessons. Therefore, we acknowledged that interactions between the system of the research activity and the system of the educational activity could happen and, as a result, the interviews could influence the actions and operations within the teachers’ science lessons. Through the transformative lenses of Activity Theory, we considered these influences could help teachers to develop a deeper understanding of their systems of teaching activity and that changes in their lessons would be caused by a negotiation of the relationships between elements – therefore, resulting in a cycle of expansive learning.

Gathering Data About IWB and Laptops, as Tools Mediating the Activity

To study how the tool mediated the activity, we considered the three levels of the activity’s structure (activity, actions and operations) (Leont’ev, 1974). Although in our study, teachers used two instruments (IWB and laptops) and the concrete operations with each instrument were different, we observed that when the IWB or the laptops were used – often simultaneously – , the attributes of the rest of the elements of the system of the activity remained unchanged. Hence, the subject (teacher), rules, community and division of labour (context of the activity) were still the same, as well as the goal of the activity, we considered that IWB and laptops were used within the same object of the activity. Therefore, IWB and laptop were analysed as a single tool. This approach was also more coherent with the context: a simultaneous introduction of both instruments in secondary schools.

Data about the three levels of activity (activity, actions and operations) with IWB and laptops was necessary to understand its mediating role. This was challenging at the level of operations since at this level the tools become transparent for the subject as if integrated into the human body (Roth et al., 2009). For example, we observed that, most times, teachers used the IWB as traditional projectors (Figure 6). Operations with the IWB used as a projector situated teachers far from the IWB when interacting, retrieving information or creating new content, regardless of the classroom arrangement (Figure 6). When teachers were asked about the aims or the conditions of these operations, these were described vaguely in most cases, suggesting that teachers had not carried out a thorough consideration of the operations undertaken with the IWB in relation with the object of the activity (developing students’ scientific competences). Therefore, teachers were not aware that the use of the computer to change the information displayed in the IWB made them turn their backs to the students when talking, interrupting the classroom dialogue (both verbal and non-verbal communication) to move from one side to another and concentrate on the manipulation of the computer, as shown in Figure 6. As the analysis of those operations was necessary to gather an understanding of the classroom activity and the situated meaning of the tool in the activity, the analysis of the mediating role of the tool at the level of operations had to rely mostly on the researchers’ interpretations.

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Figure 6.

Four different situations in which the IWB were used as traditional projectors. The use of the IWB as a traditional projector situated teachers far from the IWB regardless of the classroom arrangement.

We retrieved data about the operations with each tool from the study of the classroom actions (i.e. direct observations). To this end, we changed the design of direct observations to better capture operations with each instrument within each context (e.g. how to place the camera to capture teachers’ operations with IWB/laptops).

Using the IWB as a traditional projector evidences how this tool was used and transformed in new ways within the activity (Postholm, 2015), showing that the tool cannot be understood without the activity, which provides a meaning to the tool, and vice versa. We inferred the mediating role of the tool from data about the outcome, that is, observations, but especially from one-to-one interviews with teachers. Observations of the outcome provided a preliminary insight into the actions and operations undertaken. However, a deep understanding of the mediating role of the tool was based on the subjects’ interpretation of the relationships between the different constitutive elements of the activity. These interpretations and, in particular, the subject’s views about the subject–tool–object relationships were necessary to understand if the subject had intentionally given the situated meanings to the tool or not. We considered that the tool defined the activity, and vice versa, when the situated meaning was assigned by the context, that is, not by the teacher. Conversely, we considered that the tool transformed the activity, and vice versa, when the situated meaning was given intentionally by the subject. This process of identification also required to make visible the operations with each instrument. We also explored the interactions with other activity systems when the transformation had been produced consciously as, for example, an outcome of the teachers’ training activity system.