Participation, learning, and identity

Over the past two decades, cultural-historical activity theory has gained traction among western scholars as a framework for understanding knowing and learning in educational and workplace contexts. However, in this adoption, many foundational principles rooted in materialist dialectic have been overlooked. The theory has often been adapted to fit a dualistic perspective on various aspects of activity, such as individual versus collective and subjectivity versus intersubjectivity. This book aims to rectify this misinterpretation by adhering closely to a materialist-dialectical approach to knowing, learning, participation, and identity. The authors utilize detailed ethnographic studies from kindergarten, elementary, and middle school settings, as well as workplace environments, to explore the nuances of human activity observed in these contexts. The contributors include Wolff-Michael Roth, a Lansdowne Professor of applied cognitive science at the University of Victoria, who directs the CHAT@UVic laboratory focused on knowing and learning in science and mathematics. SungWon Hwang, a postdoctoral fellow at UVic, studies embodied cognition, while Yew Jin Lee and Maria Inês Mafra Goulart are Ph.D. candidates investigating workplace learning and science learning in kindergarten, respectively.