School curriculum planning and implementation may be viewed as a collective human activity that involves joint negotiation of meaning between teachers and multiple agents including administrators and students (Engeström, 2001). Teachers’ curricular practices are not independent and isolated; they entail interagency action and are influenced by sociocultural interactions within the school environment (Jaworski & Potari, 2009). Such interactions differ from school to school, and may setup organizational affordances and constraints in curriculum implementation. This study uses Engeström’s (2001) third generation activity theory to examine the sociocultural interactions in different school organization context. The aim is to explore the effect of organizational affordances and constraints in school curriculum planning on curricular implementation in different school contexts. The study involved two Melbourne (Australia) schools, of different socioeconomic background.

Based on Engeström’s (2001) work, an activity system is represented by six interrelated components: subject, object, artifacts, rules, community and the division of labor (Engeström, 2001). The subject may refer to an individual or a group. In this paper, the subjects of focus included the teacher, the science coordinator and the curriculum coordinator. The object refers to objectives or goals in the activity. Artifacts are the tools used by the subject to achieve their outcomes or intentions, while rules include regulations or procedures such as implementation guidelines. Community refers to social group with which the teacher identified while participating in the activity. Division of Labor (DoL) refers to how the tasks are shared among the community. 

In third generation activity theory, the unit of analysis focuses on joint activity or practice rather than on an individual activity system. Thus social interactions are studied using interacting activity systems. Central to the interacting activity systems is the notion of ‘shared object’, which is the overlap object when two or more activity systems are compared. In this study, we take this ‘shared object’ as boundary object. In the definition employed in this study, boundary object refers to the common goal for activity shared by two or more activity systems, which is consistent with Engeström’s original notion of object as activity objective.

Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of education and work, 14(1), 133-156. Jaworski, B., & Potari, D. (2009). Bridging the macro-and micro-divide: using an activity theory model to capture sociocultural complexity in mathematics teaching and its development. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 72(2), 219-236. Yin, R. K. (2011). Applications of case study research. Sage.