Modern Era of the Theory and Practice of Learning Activity: Key Issues and Perspectives

The paper describes the main stages and transitions in the unfolding of the Learning Activity which is reviewed within the framework of D.B. Elkonin and V.V. Davydov’s concepts about the meaning and content of education. The unfolding of teaching/learning is explained through the emergence of a joint action of teacher and students, that is, the Mediative Action. The concept of the Learning Task as a basis for constructing the general method of action, central to the system of D.B. Elkonin and V.V. Davydov, is also considered as a source of learning motivation. The learning task is seen as the distinct opposition between the search for the method of acting (possible scaffolds of acting) and the very achievement of the result, i.e. the opposition between the consideration (of situation) and the immediate achievement (of result), and, therefore, the opposition between the intriguing (interesting) and the required. The paper also focuses on the evolution of modeling as the evolution of sign mediation in the student’s activity. As the student progresses from understanding and configuring the model to using it as a means of acting, the model evolves. Having gained the function of the means, the model becomes a resource of possible action, and that is how the experience of acting appears before the student him/herself. The unfolding of the learning task and modeling is conceptualized as the correlation between functional genesis and ontogenesis.