The class, its artifacts and subjects, and the relationships established while it takes place, are discussed in light of activity theory, with identification of its nuclear concepts and ability to stimulate educational practices as the guiding questions of the study. The approach is based on authors whose speech is different, but who are somehow related to the Marxist dialectic: Vygotsky, Adorno, Leontiev and Engeström. The essay was designed as a four rounded spiral. The first spin starts from the concepts of learning environment and educational practice. The aim is to define the classroom as an interaction complex. At this time, cognition and its distributed character, and intelligence not as property, but as achievement are discussed. The second spin is about the concept of activity. The aim is to relate it to praxis, which comes into effect when an objectal activity enables consciousness formation. These elaborations were made through dialogues with Vygotsky's and Leontiev's ideas. And then comes the subject and his/her learning. The background is the relationship between subject and object. The meaning assigned by the subject to his/her actions is connected to the reasons that lead him/her to participate in an activity. The last spin is about activity as a social relationship complex. The main guest is Engeström. The aim is to relate the concepts of activity and experience to highlight their dialectical meaning. The objective is to develop a referential that allows the reflection about how material factors and human agents articulate themselves to promote learning opportunities; a referential that not only allows theoretical dialogues, but also encourages empirical investigations. This motive was generated from a convergence of perspectives on cognition, the class and the school, which resulted in the conceptualization of educational practice and school learning environment.
Activity theory; educational practices; learning environments