CHAT: limitations and criticism

Each theoretical framework has its own limitation and criticism, and CHAT is no exception. To start with its limitation, Wilson (2014) acknowledges that CHAT can be applied on specific and local practice, but not on ‘society as a whole’. To her, CHAT can account for a school, a university but not for the wider society which, according to him, is something ‘beyond the analytical scope of activity theory’. In line with Wilson, Uden and Kumaresan (2007) contends that CHAT fails to explain how an activity within a given context interacts with the wider socio-politics structure. In other words, the complexity of the real world, which members of an activity’s community may experience, cannot be captured by CHAT. In their view, CHAT is a ‘simplification of reality’.

In this vein, drawing on the work of Bakhurst (2009), McNicholl and Blake (2013) objected the classification of CHAT under theories as they believe that:

Activity theory is not after all a theory but rather a general schema whose explanatory power is most evident in relation to activities that are carried out by self-identifying subjects who have a well-defined object and a clear sense of the tools that might be applied (p. 10).

To relate this limitation to the Identity Theory, identity theorists argue that individuals’ identities are affected by the wider socio-political structure, along with gender, religion, race and social class. That is, individuals form and reform their identity with relation to the wider society they live in (Stryker, 2002). Hence, their actions are, at least partially, formed on the basis of their identities. Therefore, the wider society, according to identity theorists, plays a role in shaping teachers’ actions inside the classroom. This, however, is something CHAT fails to account for.

39 | P a g e To overcome this limitation, the present study will also draw on the Identity Theory.

CHAT has also been criticized as over-socializing the subject of the activity. To clarify, Billett (2006) and Valsiner and Veer (2000) acknowledge that as it explains the effect of the system on the subject (due to the constant analysis of the subject’s actions at a societal level), CHAT has ‘over-socialized’ the subject in such a way that the subject has become a representation of the society which s/he lives in.

In terms of the Identity Theory (see Stryker 2002, Stets and Burke 2003), individuals firstly create their identities as they choose the role to take in their lives. Their chosen identities are then subjected to modification due to the socio-cultural influences. Nevertheless, individuals of the same role and context behave differently. If a group of individuals with the same role live in the same context (and hence experience the same socio-cultural influence), their actions cannot be the same due to every individual’s different experience in life, or more precisely due to their ‘uniqueness’. Thus, CHAT theorists ‘over-socialize’ the subject of the activity in the sense that the subject, in CHAT, has been abstracted from its uniqueness or subjectivity (Billett, 2006).

To relate this to the present study, teachers’ uniqueness (or subjectivity) cannot be fully revealed by drawing merely on CHAT. That is, the individual differences between teachers cannot be spotted, and thus analyzed. This is because CHAT concentrates more on the outcome of the interactions between the different nodes rather than on individual nodes (including the subject node which represents teachers with respect to the present research). In other words, CHAT analyzes teaching at its societal dimension at the expense of its individual dimension.

However, this does not mean that teachers, as subjects of activity systems, are completely neglected. As stated earlier in this research, CHAT has the capacity to describe what teachers think and do. Nevertheless, this can only be done at a collective level and within the context of how other factors (for example, power

40 | P a g e and tools) influence teachers’ thinking and practices in a specific setting. Put differently, in a CHAT perspective, the subject element represents all the teachers who participated in the present research. Hence, individual differences between teachers cannot be revealed as they will all be treated evenly in the sense that they are all occupants of the same element (subject) of the activity system.

It is a common knowledge that individuals occupying the same role do not behave in an identical way. This can relate, amongst other things, to their different background, different set of beliefs and different attitudes. As one of the main aims of the present study is in analyzing teachers’ practices, the role of individual differences between teachers in shaping their practices cannot be neglected.

For this reason, the Theory of Teacher Agency (Priestley et al. 2012a, 2013, 2015) will also be used as an analytical lens as it has the capacity to show the individual differences between the teachers. These two theories will be used in this research to complete each other. While the Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987) will be used to mainly analyze the societal dimension of teaching, the theory of Teacher Agency will help in analyzing teaching at its individual dimension. Understanding each of the two dimensions is of critical importance to the present research. The present study takes the stance that teachers’ practices could best be understood and then analyzed when both the societal and individual dimensions of teaching are accounted for.