General Conclusion
Higher Education in Focus: Insights through the CulturalHistorical Activity Theory
Jaan Valsiner
This book is important. It brings to wider audiences a contemporary, theoretically grounded, look
at higher education (and education in general) that builds on the best traditions in
developmental psychology and education. The theoretical approaches covered in this book, as
well as the presentations of empirical cases, create a multi-sided picture of the varieties of the
social changes that are going on in education at large and post-secondary education in
particular. Such changes happen everywhere in our time of increasing globalization.
What is at stake is a coordinated solution to knowledge construction, its dissemination,
and the move in contemporary societies into the mode of consumerism of entertainment. When
human societal history up to our century is that of wars and suffering of other kinds, that of ours
seems to be a continuous flow of advertising of various forms of “having fun”—even ones that
bring suffering to others. Both pleasure and pain become articles of consumption. This social
mentality enters educational contexts as well, starting from the early childhood level, but ending
in settings of higher education. Education, by some view, should “be fun”, rather than devoted
mastery of the knowledge in its two versions— knowledge that is already known, and that which
does not exist yet. The latter is the focus of innovation—higher education can be the breeding
ground for mastery of the ways in which to generate new knowledge. Certainly it is based on
the mastery of the existing knowledge, but with the possibility of openness to its further
development. That focus on the new—based on the old—has been the hallmark of universities
over centuries.
The brave new world of training for consumption: the illusory freedom of choice
The social organization of human societies change. Our contemporary world is that of choices.
With the dominating focus on consuming, making choices becomes preferred to creating (new)
choices—at least for the wide audience that now can buy many things rather than be forced to
invent them. This is reflected in the contexts of higher education—students (those who study)
are turned into clients (those who use services provided). There are serious repercussions from
this societal change. Education becomes a part of service industry, rather than a context for
innovation. As such, the critical question is—whom does it serve? Increasingly, contexts of
higher education incorporate techniques of training for students to become knowledgeable
consumers of the vast array of choices they are provided by mass production of consumer
products. Intellectual challenges of creating new forms of living are replaced by learning how to
make “the right choices”—set up by various social power groups in business and politics.
Education is in danger of becoming a version of fast (slightly intellectual) nourishment of the
mind.
In the midst of such intellectual pauperization of higher education, the coverage in this
book is much needed—what is happening in the higher education systems all around the World
is troublesome if we take the need for new knowledge construction seriously. What is at stake is
the location of innovation efforts. Universities—under the slogan of becoming more linked with
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the “needs of the given society”—are in the process of surrendering new knowledge creation
tasks to other institutions—research institutes, if they exist, or private companies of specific
profit interests. Universities thus increasingly become mere transmitters of established
knowledge. But transmitting what is already known blocks the emergence of new knowledge –
that what is not yet known.
This book carries a message of counter-action to the social tendencies in contemporary
higher education where the ethos of business practices seems to take over from the historical
credo of continuity of knowledge construction. The latter is slow and intellectually painstaking—
and “does not sell” easily at the marketplace. Higher education is the arena where the future of
knowledge creation in contrast to “package knowledge” sales to the “consumers1” is determined.
It is the young—educated rather than trained—minds that carry on the role of innovation in
science, technology, and arts. Their education transcends any evaluation system that an
university uses to assess the “progress” of students, or a government introduces to evaluate the
quality of a given university. The social context of such evaluation systems needs to be
understood by its own role in the transformation of a society.
The giants who are us
The banner under which the various approaches are brought together is CHAT (Culturalhistorical Activity Theory)—and the names of Lev Vygotsky and Alexei N. Leontiev are present
on many pages of this book. There is an interesting tendency here to present the contemporary
CHAT and its applications to education as if “standing on the shoulders” of the “giants” of the
past—among whom John Dewey probably should be mentioned before Vygotsky and Leontiev
come to the stage. Dewey’s contributions to the philosophy of education in the English
speaking countries (and beyond) fits the set of historical social representations better than the
aesthetic roots of Vygotsky’s intellectual quest or Leontiev’s negotiation of Continental
European philosophy with the Soviet ideological contexts. In reality, the approaches of CHAT in
this book borrow more productively—and constructively—from the theoretical ideas of our
contemporary giants—Yrjö Engeström, Michael Cole and his experiments with the “5th
Dimension”, Dorothy Holland, Jim Gee, Jean Lave, and Barbara Rogoff. Among these giants,
Harry Daniels’ work—not yet applied to higher education— would make a new look at higher
education possible. Here the legacy of Basil Bernstein enters the scene. This building upon the
theories that have emerged in the recent decades—based on, but not reducible to Vygotsky’s or
Dewey’s contributions—that makes the socio-political claims in this book particularly powerful.
These claims are particularly important to get a wide public arena in our time where the
institutions of higher education are in a deep crisis of both their identity and economic base.
Magic of participation
All of the contributions to this book, seen together, counter the efforts of educational
institutions to turn higher education into an institutional practice of “assessments” of various
curricular based “performances.” Instead, education—and especially higher education-- relies
on students’ participation in the knowledge co-construction processes. However, participation is
no simple matter
1
In contemporary administrative practices of universities one can hear the talk of students “as clients” and
“customers”, and various evaluation systems of “customer satisfaction” are increasingly introduced as parts of
“academic quality.” Higher education in the 21st century faces a global take-over by business practices that would
necessarily transform the meaning of knowledge and its transfer to new generations.
2
Participation in the social practices, including participation in discourse, is the biggest
bootstrapping enterprise human beings engage in: speaking is necessary for learning to
speak: engaging with contexts is necessary for recognizing and dealing with contexts
(Daniels, 2006, p. 47)
It is interesting to note the agentive function attributed to the act of participation—the
person participates in an activity—without the corresponding reverse part of the system (the
activity participates in the person). This is a major oversight—proven by the examples of
musicians whose play of an instrument—obviously an agentive act by the person—
simultaneously entails the activity participating in the person. A violin player whose whole body
reverberates with the music is not just “playing the melody”, but the melody is simultaneously
“playing the person.” In order to see how participation in activity in a here-and-now context
matters one needs to look beyond that context—how such participation leads to the
development of the activity-in-person. Here lies the key to what is often labelled “professional
identity”—a generalized part of the personal culture that reverberates within the person long
after the situated activity contexts have been a matter of the past. Psychology students
professional development over three years of study at the university sensitizes them to assume
a position focused on psychological issues of others after the studies are over (Kullasepp,
2006).
Engaging with contexts of higher education requires a sociological understanding of
what the social meanings of “higher” and “education” mean. In this respect, the present volume
is important as a powerful voice in the contemporary consumerist society where education is
increasingly turned into a commodity—higher education produces certificates (BS, MA, Ph.D
degrees) as its primary outcome. And—as is the case with all commodities—the value of such
certificates on the market of governmental and academic positions is open to inflation. By
producing increasing numbers of Ph.D-s the higher education system undermines its own value
in societies, and defeats the purpose of knowledge generation that it has usually carried.
In opposition to such homogenization in administrative practices, the contributions to the
present volume amply demonstrate how the processes of knowledge co-construction in real life
teaching/learning practices are creative, and could be even more so. There is a heart-felt
concern about the future of higher education that permeates the whole volume. This gives the
book a utopian touch—it is rather unlikely that the contemporary administrative powers of higher
education would easily accept the CHAT-based suggestions for improving educational
practices. However, without trying one never knows—hence another reason to give this book
an appropriate and active advertising backing. It should reach that sub-group of educational
administrators who might worry about the future of post-secondary education as it is under
serious jeopardy by being cut in different countries undertaking general budget cuts, and funded
by private business interests solely for the purposes of future narrow profit making.
A new kind of working class: the knowledge workers
This book should become a leading source in our understanding of the social and psychological
realities in post-secondary education that are in place within our developing societies. Aside
from systematically promoting the cultural-historical activity (CHAT) perspective, it also
addresses key issues in where the whole notion of higher education is moving in the 21st
society. It is interesting to see the parallels here with those of the Industrialization Era of the
19th century-- where the new predicament of factory workers emerged as the industries moved
out of the social structures of manufacture to those of large-scale factories of mass production.
As we well know, that social transformation led to the homogenization of the large masses of
workers who, as imaginatively pointed out by Karl Marx, had nothing to lose but their chains.
3
Now, in the 21st century we observe a similar process of proletarianization of the
intellectual activities as work. The notion of knowledge workers who are produced by higher
education in increasingly large numbers and assessed by institutions as to their readiness to
become parts of the “factories of knowledge production”—in businesses, government agencies
and NGOs, and even in educational systems modelled after businesses—suggests the parallel
between the 19th and 21st centuries here. It remains to be seen if the new proletariat of
knowledge workers becomes united to create new kinds of havoc within the social institutions
that need them.
There is of course a difference with the factory workers of the 19th century—while then
and there the conveyer belts were located in one factory, then in the case of the knowledge
proletariat of the 21st century that factory floor is the whole world. Successful computer hackers
and maverick stock traders demonstrate the dangers of knowledge that goes beyond the
information given (by social institutions in the context of post-secondary education). Revolts by
knowledge workers are more dangerous for the holders of contemporary social power than all
the revolutionary barricades of the 19th century ever were. Will there be another revolution of
1917 in 2017—not in St. Petersburg but on London (or Doha) Stock Exchange?
Time will, of course, tell—but at the present we have first examples of the impacts of
collective actions by the underclass of (mostly unemployed) “knowledge workers.” References
to the use of new technologies in bringing about “the Arab Spring” (chapter by Russell Francis,
p. 106) seem to indicate the potential that the young knowers have that can topple the old
oligarchs. However, the result need not be further “democratization” of democracy-phobic
social institutions—be these governments or ministries of education—but a new form of
carefully guarded social practices with a democratic façade. The latter is—in a microcosm—
debated by the various contributions to the volume. Systems of higher education allow such
facades to emerge and flourish—together with greater student participation comes the stated
need of universities to “contribute to societies”—assuming the latter are “democratic” in their
nature, rather than guarded by the social class of civil servants who inhabit ministries of
education. Viv Ellis emphasizes
The university..., has been disengaged from society, has had its public functions removed
by the state and replaced by the right of government to ‘represent’ public interests in all
spheres. The university’s role in the creation of the publics has been lost. The student
becomes a consumer whose choices will be guided by market rationality and, outside the
individual’s investment in their economic futures or the university's position in global
rankings such as the Shanghai Jia Tong, there need be no relation to society. (p. 200)
Here is a potential paradox— what is labelled “democracy” can take many forms, some
of which are governmentally guarded and non-democratically determined by the power
hierarchy of a ministry. To whom does “contribution to society” belong—to the democratic
populace? Or to the (democratically or otherwise) elected representatives of that populace? Or
to the civil servant in a ministry who speaks eloquently about “democracy” while introducing
business practices to schools and universities? A careful sociological or political sciences’
based analysis of the connection of higher education systems with the Realpolitik of “democratic
societies” might be useful.
For example-- on the introduction of the “Bologna system” in
European universities and its implications—for “neoliberal” and “democratic” goals for higher
education. Are democratically approved top-to-down administrative practices any better than
similar demands given by a king, an emperor, or the governor?
Different contributors detect this basic tension in their contributions to the book—and
suggest ways to overcome it. Their search for solutions is substantive, theoretically elaborated,
and probably slightly utopian. Yet utopias are important for making actual social change. But
there are not many arenas where these solutions can be put to practice. The efforts described
4
by Gordon Wells in his chapter illustrate the complexity of the efforts in an undergraduate
context. Viv Ellis believes change can be implemented by teacher education:
… as a good example of a democratic and powerful mode of knowledge production that
grows out of hybrid practices (academic and professional; instrumental and reflexive;
personal and political) and of dialogue between researchers and research subjects and
research ‘end-users’. In working in the hybrid spaces between universities, schools and
communities, teacher education can bring together diverse actors with varying interests
and expertise to create knowledge that can meet multiple tests of rigour in intersecting
networks of practice. Conceptualising teacher education as hybrid knowledge-creating
practices or as an activity rich with potential for a more democratic mode of knowledge
production also requires that we think through the power differentials in bringing people
together – teachers and professors, children and students, parents, members of
communities. The implication is therefore one of struggle - of competing interests - in
which there is something for everyone to give up as well as for a collective, democratic
gain (p. 200)
Ellis’ arguments are crucial for the volume (see also Editors’ introduction)—as education of
educators is probably the only arena that can insert novel ways of acting into otherwise fatigue
and bureaucracies dominated practices of teaching—at school or university level. How can
teacher education— setting up professional roles within the non-democratic institution as a
“school-that-serves-clients” while “delivering the curriculum” to these very “clients”—enhance its
democratization? There is a double standard in this discourse—the non-democratic goals
(“production” of societally fitted “knowledge workers” that fit precisely to the needed “slots” in a
constant flux of contemporary societies, determined by business interests) and the advertised
“client orientation”. The contemporary education and higher education systems are operating
under the influence of this contradiction.
Still its success depends upon the educational system as a whole, it is not surprising that
the idea of “participation in a community” is found to take a different form in Singapore (p. 2182
). The key question remains—the meaning of community remains ill-defined. It can mean
anything from the person’s immediate social context to the whole of humankind. It is not clear
how that community is organized—yet it is revered in the most positive ways. Individuals are
expected to contribute to the community, find their identity in it, and not be suspicious of it.
Community benevolence is not to be doubted—precisely as it acts as a superordinate social
system that creates the conditions for social life.
What happens in higher education: coordinating genres
At the highest level of post-secondary education—writing MA or Ph.D. theses is indicated as
multi-genre writing (p.86) as their writers are
Caught between the activity systems of the institution and its requirements, on one hand,
and the discipline and its practices on the other, newcomers to the genre and activity of the
thesis/dissertation bring their own sociocultural history and take an active role in learning to
2
” In Singapore, the students did not see themselves as participating in a community of early childhood
educators. Instead, they saw themselves as planning to participate in the community of early childhood
practitioners, mostly in the role of directors of early childhood centres. Their resistance to our intentions to
engage them in the wider community obliged us to broaden our sense of what participation in
communities meant and raised questions about how to maintain the focus on learning to engage in
practices with historical legacies and meanings that might link individuals together into meaningful
groups, or communities.” (Tonyan and Auld, p. 218)
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write it. Disciplinary enculturation is less a slow absorption or unconscious, passive
assimilation and more a conscious, often chaotic battle, though often hidden from view (p.
84).
The active knowledge constructor—“the learner”—is the target for efforts to guide her/him to
learn what is expected, or maybe what is new and useful, but not dangerous for the social
system as such. Such selectivity of potential future knowledge moves ahead of any democratic
decision making—a feature that democratized educational contexts would poorly recognize. Or,
better said—the fears of uncontrollable futures limit the extent of democratization of educational
practices by the power holders in the present.
How can such analysis proceed? Harry Daniels has suggested that
… that there is need to analyse and codify the mediational structures as
they deflect and direct attention of participants. In this sense I am
advocating the development of cultural-historical analysis of the invisible or
implicit meditational properties of institutional structures that themselves
are transformed through the actions of those whose interactions are
influenced by them. (Daniels, 2010, p. 381, added emphases)
While Daniels’ research programme has concentrated on comparisons between schools
of different kinds, an equally compelling prospect is to analyze the heterogeneity of
social suggestions within a school. If we take Daniels’ ideas to the analysis of colleges
and universities we may gain a better understanding of what the notion of higher means
in our contemporary higher education. It is precisely the invisible curriculum of the
institutions of higher learning—that of endless re-organization plans, institutional review
panels, faculty evaluation practices, prolonged and meaningless committee meetings
that keep academics busy in paperwork and reduce their creative time—these are all
phenomena that need to be analyzed as a major part of situated activity contexts in
higher education. Instead of the ideal of pedagogy of inclusion (Daniels et al, 2006) we
have in higher education a social practice of exclusion—of the academics from their
own creative resources. Among the latter, making space for non-fragmented time is
crucial. The social practices of scheduling various kinds of committee meetings all over
worktime fragments the time available to knowledge creation. Instead of sitting in
committee meetings and giving lectures to classes filled with students and their
laptops3, the academics have the basic right for time for the creation of new knowledge.
Such basic right is often overlooked in the contemporary higher education contexts. In
the context of higher education, the act of inclusion would take the form of exclusion of
the educators and students from socio-politically mandated shared time expenditure
contexts. To be included in the actual teaching/learning process the instructors and
students need to be excluded from spending time off their main task—knowledge reconstruction.
3
The laptops—paired with wireless connections—make the notion of a “class” (a group of people held in a
particular room for a specified time) ephemeral. While being held in such temporary confinements, the students
can transcend the boundaries of the immediate situated activity and be involved in many others. Organizing
activities of students by specific class times in the 21st century is an administrative practice that has lost touch with
the new technological realities. Adhering to that practice fragments the time of both instructors and students,
rather than re-organizes it around new knowledge construction tasks.
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Conclusion: What do we learn?
What can be learned from this book? Very much indeed. The reader gets a glipse into
innovative applications of CHAT which is a framework that provides a fresh look at the
educational practices. That has been accomplished elsewhere for school education. In
this volume this is extended to higher education contexts, with similarly fruitful results.
What we also learn is the honest desire by educationalists and researchers to improve
“the society.” Yet we are kept in the dark about what that “society” means, what forms it
takes, and how it actually scaffolds the efforts of the CHAT (and other) researchers to
“contribute to” itself. The counter-process to contribution to society is distancing of the
researchers from the society—by its institutions. Institutions are often wary of the
possible insights upon themselves that academics may produce, or may want to use the
input from research for particular short-term political benefits. So—universities are
ambivalent institutions from the perspective of power holders—whether these were the
aristocratic rulers of small German lands with universities in each of these in the c19th
century, or in 21st century various versions of democratic governments around the
World. While universities may produce humble civil servants to take their roles in the
power structures, they-- at times -- can be breeding grounds for students-led revolts and
revolutions. Or the researchers in universities can see through the political game plans
of the politicians, exposing those to our ever-scavenging mass media, requiring
communicative repairs to the political images. With these fears being real, it is not
surprising that the view of the active academic who honestly “participates in the society”
through trying to be of help in solving relevant social problems is potentially ambivalent.
Academics might be asked for advice—but its implementation depends on the political,
rather agendas of the time and place, rather than on research evidence. So—the best
strategy for politicians looking at academics is to be distantly friendly and
apprehensively non-committal.
That kind of distancing—both by the power-holders of the academics, and by the
latter from politics-- is rarely under consideration when social sciences—and
scientists—look at their own roles within the society. This is an oversight in the field—
which needs to be analyzed as a basic social process. Predictably, frustrated social
scientists and educators are often in the habit of complaining that their best suggestions
are passed by—or actively dismissed—by policy makers and the profit-interested
enterpreneurs. But the social functions of such buffering from the realities of social
action by the actors has not been studied in general. The practitioners of any caliber—
school teachers, principals, small (and big) powerholders at ministries, and, finally,
ministers, kings, and CEOs—have all the good reasons to be suspicious of research.
This is not a matter of poor understanding. Societally speaking, new knowledge
is potentially dangerous—while re-packaged old knowledge is known not to be, while
promising profitability. Talking of “evidence based” areas of knowledge (medicine is the
usual target here) as if these were “gold standards” of the ideal knowledge is an act of
appropriation of institutionally fitting knowledge, rather than making our knowledge
“solid”. Doing that is merely a labeling trick—substantiating one fashionable (“solid”)
belief with another. One can do that with knowledge that is fixed—but not with the one
that is emerging:
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Scientific discovery reveals new knowledge, but the new vision that
accompanies it is not knowledge. It is less than knowledge, for it is a
guess; but it is more than knowledge, for it is a foreknowledge of things
unknown and at present perhaps inconceivable. Our vision of the general
nature of things is our guide for the interpretation of all future experience.
Such guidance is indispensable. Theories of the scientific method which
try to explain the establishment of scientific truth by any purely objective
formal procedure are doomed to failure. Any process of enquiry unguided
by intellectual passions would inevitably spread out into a desert of
trivialities. (Polanyi, 1962, p. 135)
So—higher education cannot be a place for simple transfer of knowledge because the
frontiers of science are not about knowledge, but about processes of its creation.
Following CHAT renders the notion of universities becoming parts of the “entertainment
service industry” ridiculous. Contributions to this book provide ample demonstration of
such kind. But it still remains to be seen how effectively the perspectives based on
CHAT can change the course of institutional homogenization of the sphere of higher
education. Meanwhile—the reader of the present volume can gain valuable insights into
the small realities of the ongoing social processes in higher education.
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S., Popova, A., and Warmington, P. (2006). Studying professional learning for
inclusion. In K. Yamazumi, Y. Engeström, and H. Daniels (Eds.), New learning
challenges: Going beyond the industrial age system of school and work. Osaka:
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