INTRODUCTION: "Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction"

Less than a decade ago, Yrjö Engeström (1993) called activity theory “the best kept secret of academia” (p. 64), although at the time of his writing, there was a lively discussion in the USSR concerning, for example, the work of A. N. Leont’ev (25 citations to his Russian publications in 1992). Nevertheless, Engeström was right in the sense that in the Western and, more specifically, the Anglo-Saxon literature, the activity theory was virtually unknown. One indicator of the infancy stage of activity theory at that time is the frequency with which the term activity theory appears as a keyword in articles that are included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) maintained by the Institute for Scientific Information. As Figure 1 shows, prior to the year 1990, activity theory was a key word in two or fewer articles per year. Similarly, the English version of perhaps the most important book for the dissemination of activity theory in the English-speaking world was cited only infrequently (Figure 1). However, the figure also shows that the frequencies of activity theory as a key word and the citations of Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (Leont’ev, 1978) increased dramatically after 1990. The dramatic increase of interest in activity theory in the English-speaking academic circles is, without doubt, in part due to Yrjö Engeström who, through his publications and presentations in a variety of disciplines, spread the word so that activity theory no longer is the secret that it was in 1993 (Figure 1). His most cited work by far, Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (Engeström, 1987), increasingly over the past decade has found its way into authors’ reference lists in the journals included in SSCI. The increasing interest for activity theory in education can also be gauged from the increasing attendance in activity-theory–related sessions at the annual conferences of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The articles in this issue arose from one of these sessions, a multiple-paper session with the theme “Activity Theory in Education,” sponsored by the special interest group for cultural–historical activity theory during the 2001 AERA meeting in Seattle, Washington. Although the theme was very open, it turned out that all papers dealt with a core issue of activity theory—the transformations of individuals and their community, which result from the fact that human beings do not merely react to their life conditions but that they have the power MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 11(1), 1–8 Copyright © 2004, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition