Abstract
Science education research tends to be concerned with phenomena that appear on its inside – e.g., inside science classrooms, labs, museums, clubs – and generally forgets that we structure our everyday lives in terms of the activities that we engage in and the hierarchical relations between the object/motives that orient each of these activities. But life is diverse, and science education is only a minor part in the everyday life of a person. Rather than thinking about learning through the narrow perspective of the science curriculum, I suggest we need to think it from a diversity-of-life perspective. It is precisely this diversity of life that is at the source of diversity science educators often write about. In this chapter, I articulate a cultural-historical activity theoretic perspective that contextualizes science and science education in the everyday life of a person more generally. I show how within and across the diverse activities, which are characterized by specific object/motives that they are oriented to, we become subjects (a process that I denote by the term subjectification) and persons simultaneously. Moving across multiple activities leads each individual to develop of a hierarchy of collective object/motives. The hierarchy of object/motives developing as a result of our continual movement across the diverse activities of our daily lives shapes a continual developmental process that I term personality. The individual personality, therefore, consists of an ensemble of collective objects/motives that are arranged in a singular hierarchy. To concretize the theoretical aspects of this chapter, I draw on materials from the ten ethnographic studies in which my students and I have followed individuals over periods of 3–10 years within and outside of science.
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Notes
- 1.
Activity is understood throughout this chapter in the manner that the concept was developed in the German and Russian languages of the founders of activity theory. Thus, these languages make clear distinctions between Tätigkeit/deyatel’nost’ (activity) and Aktivität/aktivnost’ (activity). The first term refers to a specifically societal formation designed to meet a collective need (food, tools, shelter), whereas the second term refers to being busy without a collective object/motive (predmet).
- 2.
When a Russian author’s name appears in the text, I consistently use the English spelling of the name. When I reference an original or a translation into another language (e.g., German), then the name appears as printed on the book cover.
- 3.
In dialectical materialism, a moment is a structural aspect of a phenomenon that cannot be understood on its own but only in its part/whole relation with the entire phenomenon and, thereby, in its relation to all other moments that can be identified. The moments do not add up to yield the whole, because, among others, they may in fact stand in a contradictory relation to other moment in the same way that particle and wave nature do not add up to yield the phenomenon of light.
- 4.
This is why the products of human activities can create new needs, for example, the production of the cell phone created the need for cell phones so that today many people “cannot live without it.” The need did not just exist; it is not a basic need that “must” be filled for humans to live. It is a need that is the result of productive human activity (Leontjew 1982; Marx and Engels 1962).
- 5.
Here, as elsewhere, my translation takes into account what Marx has written rather than what translators into English produce – perhaps for political reasons. Marx writes about societal (Ger. gesellschaftliche) rather than social (Ger. soziale) relations. In the original text translated as “Concrete Human Psychology” (Vygotsky 1989), the authors quote Marx using the Russian equivalent for societal (obshchestvennyj) rather than the one for social (sozial’nyo) (Vygotskij 2005). Similarly, the Russian and its German translations of Thought and Language use the same equivalent of societal as distinct from social, whereas the English translation only uses the adjective social.
- 6.
In this quote, Vygotsky does indeed use the adjectival forms sozial’nyi and sozial’nim, social but which may also be translated as societal.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Pei-Ling Hsu, who, supported through these grants, collected the data as part of her dissertation and postdoctoral work in my laboratory. I thank the participants, who have agreed to be part of our research program over such a long period of time.
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Roth, WM. (2013). Activity, Subjectification, and Personality: Science Education from a Diversity-of-Life Perspective. In: Mansour, N., Wegerif, R. (eds) Science Education for Diversity. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4563-6_3
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