page_title: Cultural-historical activity theory
section_title: First generation – Vygotsky
hierarchical_section_title: Cultural-historical activity theory / Historical overview / The three generations of activity theory / First generation – Vygotsky
caption_attribution_description: English: Vygotsky's mediated action triangle (Individual - culture), following Engeström, Yrjö (1999), Learning by expanding: Ten years after, translated from the German edition by Falk Seeger, and Nygård, Kathrine (2010), Introduction to Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), InterMedia, University of Oslo
context_page_description: Cultural-historical activity theory is a theoretical framework which helps to understand and analyse the relationship between the human mind and activity. It traces its origins to the founders of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N. Leontiev. Vygotsky's important insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experience. Especially since the 1990s, CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide. Elsewhere CHAT has been defined as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans purposefully transform natural and social reality, including themselves, as an ongoing culturally and historically situated, materially and socially mediated process". Core ideas are: 1 humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions; 2 humans make, employ, and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate; and 3 community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning – and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting.
context_section_description: The first generation emerges from Vygotsky's theory of cultural mediation, which was a response to behaviorism's explanation of consciousness, or the development of the human mind, by reducing "mind" to a series of atomic components or structures associated primarily with the brain as "stimulus – response" (S-R) processes. Vygotsky argued that the relationship between a human subject and an object is never direct but must be sought in society and culture as they evolve historically, rather than in the human brain or individual mind unto itself. His cultural-historical psychology attempted to account for the social origins of language and thinking.  To Vygotsky, consciousness emerges from human activity mediated by artifacts (tools) and signs. 
   This idea of semiotic mediation is embodied in Vygotsky's famous triangular model which features the Subject (S), Object (O), and Mediating Artifact triad: in mediated action the Subject, Object, and Artifact stand in a dialectical relationship whereby each affects the other and the activity as a whole. Vygotsky argues that the use of signs leads to a specific structure of human behavior, which breaks away from mere biological development allowing the creation of new forms of culturally-based psychological processes – hence the importance of (cultural-historical) context: individuals could no longer be understood without their cultural environment, nor society without the agency of the individuals who use and produced these artifacts. The objects became cultural entities, and action oriented towards the objects became the key to understanding the human psyche. In the Vygotskyan framework the unit of analysis, however, remains principally the individual. First-generation activity theory has been used to understand individual behavior by examining the ways in which a person's objectivized actions are culturally mediated.  Besides a strong focus on material and symbolic mediation, internalization of external (social, societal, and cultural) forms of mediation, another important, aspect of first generation CHAT is the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), meaning, as advanced in Mind in Society (1978), "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers". ZDP is one of the major legacies of Vygotsky's work in the social sciences.
caption: First Generation CHAT
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