Critical realist activity theory (CRAT)

• Main Author: Nunez, Iskra
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2012
• Subjects: 370.15
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.630834

This thesis develops a theoretical-interpretive scheme, a Critical Realist Activity Theory (CRAT). It is argued that learning is a passage through the dialectic, the logic of emancipation and for self-emancipation. The structure of CRAT follows the 1M-5A Bhaskarian dialectical schema to show how the theories of Collaborative Learning, Cooperative Learning, Supplemental Instruction, and Activity Theory (AT) function in a pluralist sense to account for the main critical realist categories of reality — 1M: learning as product (non-identity), 2E: learning as process (negativity), 3L: learning as process-in-product (totality), 4D: learning as product-in-process (transformative agency), and 5A: learning as emancipatory intentionality (reflexivity). In particular, CRAT engages the basic tenets of Critical Realism to provide a philosophical foundation and simultaneously, a resolution to various dualisms that AT suffers from. An immanent critique of AT, as a method of argumentation, is particularly effective for this purpose since it involves taking a theory and its claims about the world and using them to show that the theory is inconsistent with itself. Then CRAT goes on to show, at the level of omissive critique, that a key element that is absent from the historical development of the activity-theoretical approach and explains its dualisms is the omission of a critique of empiricism, i.e., a critique of Humean philosophy. Thereafter, CRAT goes on from the immanent and omissive critiques, a step further with an explanatory critique as a means by which to reincorporate the absent element in AT in order to reclaim and strengthen our perception of emancipatory human praxis. The result from cementing this tradition in a critical realist philosophy is a move through dialectical learning.