Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
teacher education (van Huizen, van Oers, & Wubbels, 2005), present users of CHAT do not customarily attend to this aspect. In CHAT, emotion is reinforced at both meaning-determining levels, that is, at the core of the activity|action and action|operation dialectics. On the one hand, there are aspects of emotion that “are relevant to activity and not to actions or operations that realize it” (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 121). Increasing one’s possibilities in the world and control over one’s life conditions—learning in the broad sense—are associated with positive emotional valence. The subject receives successes and failures with respect to the chosen motive positively or negatively, but the possibility of success shapes the way in which the subject engages in activity. On the other hand, current emotional states constitute a context for the selection of meaningful actions and the operations that realize them, but actions also feed back and mediate emotional states. While acting, these emotional states are latent in consciousness but are exhibited nevertheless, for example, in prosody: speech intensity, pitch, pitch contours, speech rates (Pittam & Scherer, 1993). Finally, during cooperative work that is so much part of any teacher’s instructional repertoire, individual and collective emotions are two sides of the same coin, so to speak: Individuals exhibit emotions in their actions, which supply cues and traces for other people who may reproduce them and therefore contribute to a collective emotion (Collins, 2004). Educational researchers may come to appreciate that emotions are always tied to the motives and goals of learning, which require in situ study: asking individuals in clinical situations, which usually have a different object or motive than the activity of primary interest, elicits peculiar emotions and emotional valences from other activity systems. With respect to the environmental unit, one might ask the following questions: “How does the activity system in general (e.g., farming, environmentalism) and the overlap between individual and collective motives in particular mediate emotions?” “How do emotions mediate the participation in activity (e.g., farming, environmentalism)?” “How do emotions mediate the selection of goals and actions?” “How are the emotions shaped by the concrete actions of realizing the learning activity?” and “How do individual and collective object- or motive-related emotions mediate one another?” For example, does engagement in an activity such as environmentalism lead to a different sense of feeling good, having contributed to the collective well-being, than contributing to the production of food? Identity During the pursuit of the object, subjects not only produce outcomes but also produce|reproduce themselves (Wenger, 1998). By extension, the changed modes of participation in social practices—learning in a broad sense—presupposes both what we become and how we act as knowers. Whichever identities are salient for an individual during a particular context exist in a complex dance with one’s sense of agency and position within the social world. Besides bringing about some change in the world, human agency also provides others and self with resources for making attributions about the kind of person one is. Within school, students exhibit multiple identities, such as Davie, whose actions led to an assessment of ADHD, whereas his observable competence at Henderson Creek led the researchers to another conclusion. Identity is evidently a dialectical feature: It is continuously produced and reproduced in practical activity, which both presupposes and produces 215 Downloaded from http://rer.aera.net by Giorgio Bertini on October 12, 2010