Notes on ‘3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research,’ ‘4. The instruments of expansion’ and ‘5. Towards an expansive methodology.’
Engestrom argues that human activity does not occur in a vacuum. Instead, it always occurs within a social context: ‘Human activity is not only individual production. It is simultaneously and inseparably also social exchange and societal distribution. In other words, human activity always takes place within a community governed by a certain division of labor and by certain rules.’
Furthermore, Engestrom argues that meaning is not constrained by design. Instead, meaning is forged out of usage: ‘A tool always implies more possible uses than the original operations that have given birth to it.’ Similarly, ‘The instructor’s task and the learner’s perceived task are seldom the same thing.’ In this specific sense there is a close connection between Engestrom’s standpoint and Wenger’s analysis of how communities of practice work (1998, p. 80): ‘Even when a community of practice arises in response to some outside mandate, the practice evolves into the community’s own response to that mandate.’ Thus, meaning is not a given (though it may be prompted), but a construct.
In addition, Engestrom challenges the scaffolding metaphor which has, in recent years, become a favourite descriptive tool for social constructivists in learning and teaching. Engestrom’s problem with the metaphor is that it still imposes limits on the knowledge that the learner can construct and, ultimately, ‘the idea of scaffolding is restricted to the acquisition of the given.’
Engestrom’s description of the activity system, the tensions therein and hence the creation of new knowledge and understanding, implies that human activity both works within and challenges tradition. Considering creativity, he argues ‘a work of art (or science)… requires simultaneously acceptance of a convention… and passing beyond it’ and, ‘scientific discoveries… are to a large extent achievements of synthesizing and crystallizing elements that were already “there.”’ A similar argument for the creative process is made by T.S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood (1922), in which Eliot accepts that the artist is always working within an inherited tradition, which is there to be used in order to enable new creation, an argument which takes Eliot to the position of ‘immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’ Both writers, therefore, see creation not as a spontaneous process (generating that which had not been conceived of before) but as a significant reconfiguration of existing, though not static, economic, social and cultural resources.
In seeking to understand how an activity system changes, and having recognised that tension between nodes in the activity system precipitates change, Engestrom uses the metaphor of the springboard: ‘the springboard is a facilitative image, technique or socio-conversational constellation (or a combination of these) misplaced or transplanted from some previous context into a new, expansively transitional activity context during an acute conflict…’ Tension between nodes, therefore, is a precondition for creativity, and springboards offer a route out of tension towards a new activity system, but they do not in themselves comprise the solution to tensions: ‘Springboards do not come about smoothly and automatically. They appear in times of distress, almost as lifebuoys… Springboards are not solutions. They are starters or hints toward a path leading to an expansive solution.’
Engestrom’s analysis is broadly Marxist in the sense that he sees tension as the spur to progress. Furthermore, he uses the Marxist term ‘dialectics,’ though with his own definition: ‘In my analysis, dialectics is the logic of expansion. And expansion is essentially a social and practical process, having to do with collectives of people reconstructing their material practice.’ However, Engestrom argues that existing structures of learning and teaching militate against the collective construction of new knowledge and understanding: ‘Industrial capitalism is the triumph of individualism. Here, the mature form of learning is obligatory school-going. In the obligatory school, the dominant unit of functioning is the individual, spatially and temporally discrete task.’ Therefore, formal education exists to hinder creativity, not to encourage it.
Engestrom’s distinction between the individual and the social may be problematic in the sense that the activity system presupposes that individuals inhabit, inescapably, social contexts. Furthermore, the activity system within which people function, and which they may go on to transform, is a tradition, an inherited set of values and practices. Therefore, the distinction between the individual and the social may be a false one. As Wenger (1998, p. 141) argues: ‘Our knowing – even of the most unexceptional kind – is always too big, too rich, too ancient, and too connected for us to be the source of it individually.’
In his conclusion, Engestrom returns to Vygotsky and the idea that, in human behaviour, a stimulus and a response have ‘a human-created symbolic stimulus mediating between the two.’ Furthermore, Vygotsky’s object of analysis was ‘observations of behaviour in daily life,’ and, more broadly, ‘the historical transformation of cultures.’ Engestrom follows Vygotsky’s lead, but is also interested in where tension is experienced, arguing ‘individually manifested doubt, hesitation and disturbance is the starting point. The direction is from the individual to the societal. However, the individual point of departure is itself understandable only as a cultural-historical product.’ As individuals and collectives respond to tensions and seek to create resolutions, ‘The practical solutions that represent the unexpected, the unrecognizable, are actually initial forms of new theories.’ Tension is necessary to create the new, and the breakdown of one activity system prompts the creation of a new activity system, more suited to its economic and social contexts. Hence, social progress is facilitated by tension, and expansive learning arises when existing activity systems are no longer fit for purpose.
Wenger, Etienne (1998, repr. 2005), Communities of Practice, Cambridge , Cambridge University Press.
