Notes on ‘1. Introduction: The futility of learning’ and ‘2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning.’
For Engestrom, problem solving is a reactive form of learning, and purportedly supportive modes of teaching (sometimes characterised by the scaffolding metaphor of teaching) are thus patronising and futile: ‘the poor learners must be helped to cope with the tasks given to them.’ Conversely, effective learning involves reconfiguring the learner as a partner in the fundamental design of learning; we should be ‘enabling the users themselves to plan and bring about the qualitative changes (including the design and implementation of technologies) in their life contexts.’ Engestrom is thus interested in expansive processes which, though ‘elusive and uncontrollable,’ also enable people to ‘transcend the contexts given to them.’
Engestrom links the origins of formal learning with the emergence of literacy: ‘Schools do indeed appear wherever people start reading and writing. In their very generality, reading and writing are such abstract or indirect instruments that they cannot be learned by simply participating in work activity.’ Simple apprenticeships can occur in less formal contexts, but the abstract qualities of reading and writing require a formal context for their transmission, separate from everyday intercourse.
However, for Engestrom, increasing tensions are evident in schooling, because students are simultaneously engaging in production and consumption themselves: ‘today’s pupils are at an early age intensively drawn into the market as relatively independent consumers, even as producers of exchange values (as computer hackers, as sport stars and performers, etc.). When the pupils’ direct participation in the societal production is intensified, the “holding power” of the school is endangered. In this respect, school-going may well be approaching a crisis of new qualitative dimensions. Whether this will mean a breakthrough into learning activity at school – that remains to be seen.’ If students are not dependent on school as a pre-condition for producing and consuming in economic and social contexts, they are less likely to engage with school and will thus bypass it, in terms of their commitment and participation if not their actual, physical attendance. Conversely, learning activities that recognise students’ existences as consumers and producers are more likely to connect with students.
Engestrom goes on to define what is meant by learning activity: ‘The essence of learning activity is production of objectively, societally new activity structures (including new objects, instruments, etc.) out of actions manifesting the inner contradictions of the preceding form of the activity in question.’ Hence, when one element of an Activity System (Vygotsky, 1927) contradicts another, it generates conflict, but thus also an opportunity to construct new knowledge. Learning activities expose contradictions in systems, and imagine what can be constructed out of the contradictions. In this sense, learning activities may be seen to define some of the conditions and outcomes of artistic and scientific production: ‘The learning actions inherent in scientific and artistic activity are those of learning to imagine, learning to “go beyond the given”, not in the privacy on the individual mind but in the public, material objectifications.’
For Engestrom, therefore, problem-based learning is itself problematic because it makes students passive recipients of problems, not active constructors of their own learning journeys. He opposes problem solving with expansive learning activities, which acknowledge contradictions within activity systems and produce new structures out of those contradictions.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1927/1997) The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, vol. 3: problems of the theory and history of Psychology, ed. by R. W. Rieber, and J. Wollock, New York, Plenum.
