This writing is about a researcher-practitioner collaborating with teacher-practitioners and conducting instructional interventions in their ongoing mathematics classrooms. In an impressionist manner this also traces my intellectual journey from growing up and teaching middle school grades in India, my doctoral training in Norway, an extended post doctoral in Sweden which funded visiting fellowships in the US and UK, before returning to teach Bachelor and Master students in India.
Such a travelogue is rooted in perspectives of human development put forth by the Vygotsky, Luria and Leont’ev branch of Soviet psy-chology, termed cultural historical activity theory and/or CHAT in present times. Explicit attention to the concrete practical makes this effort, integra-tive – across time, continents and institutions, and interdisciplinary – braiding practitioner, pedagogical, critical and curriculum genres of inquiry.
In doing the above I draw on the arts as well as the sciences to present my case of arts-and-science-in-the-making, one that positions the taking of practitioner action and attention to human development as central to edu-cational theory and practice. Three features singular to CHAT are realised (1) adopting a tool-and-result approach, (2) ascending from the conceptual abstract to the practical concrete and (3) conceiving the cultural-historical development of students and practitioners, besides their agency and be-coming human, in a dialectical manner.
All chapters in this book begin with a preamble and end with a coda, of-fering thematic sections in-between that serve as insightful lenses with which to both grasp and take transformative action. The epilogue gathers aspects from across my writing that qualify the nature of action, nature of theory and nature of dialectic at play in various concrete practicals. I also forward a wholistic practitioner-as-artist-and-scientist as analytical unit, de-ployable across educational practices of different grain size.
The notion of taste as forwarded by the Russian literary philosopher Bakhtin, underpins my citing scholarship from diverse fields compatible with CHAT throughout my writing. Also germane is his counsel that art and life are not one and need to become united, as we answer our lifelong calling as practitioners. May our tribe flourish and ever increase.