Societal Mediation of Mathematical Cognition and Learning

Cultural-historical activity theory, originally developed by A. N. Leontjew in the 1960s and 70s, has been experiencing a revival in Western scholarship over the past two decades. Whereas the analytical category “activity” was offered up as a category that denotes systems that contribute to the production of things to meet generalized, societal needs, it tends to be used in mathematics education to refer to simple tasks and exercises − e.g., calculating the areas of geometrical figures. In this paper I argue, drawing on empirical examples from my own research, that the very strengths of cultural-historical activity theory are not realized, which lie in the affordance to integrate macro-sociological with micro-psychological dimensions of cognition and learning. Moreover, in the current way the theory is used, its potential as a critical theory is given short shrift in the service of emancipatory efforts that uproot the tendency for schooling to reproduce bourgeois society and its class structure.