Negative stereotypes of authoritarian thinking inherited from the Soviet period are deeply ingrained in the minds of Ukrainian teacher educators (Koshmanova & Ravchyna, 2008a). The rejection of communist educational legacy became one of such stereotypes (Koshmanova, 2008). However, refusing from this legacy, Ukrainian educators are also rejecting the best ideas of cultural-historical philosophy (Vygotsky, 1978) and activity theory (Leontiev, 1977) which came to the international prominence (Koshmanova, 2007). The situation becomes worse if to combine these attitudes with educators’ insufficient understanding of social equality connected with the young age of democratic system in Ukraine since its independence (1991). In the face of European integration, the complex issues of equality and human rights are acquiring a new dimension and constitute challenging goals for educators (Koshmanova, 2008b). The difficult tasks teacher educators now confront are how best to help young people participate in an increasingly pluralistic world and how to instill civic values necessary for them to deal with ethnic, racial and class differences (Koshmanova & Holm, 2007). The mission needs to be extended to include teaching critical thinking so that young people can compete in the market economy and contribute to common good within united Europe, a concept promoted by the Bologna Process. The study is aimed at investigating how cultural-historical theory of activity can be effectively used by teacher educators for developing teacher candidates’ civic values, their attitudes to care for those who are in need, as well as how to actively participate in socially meaningful activity without any expectation for reward and how to contribute to democratic development of a post-conflict country. A theoretical framework is based on the premises of cultural-historical theory of activity (Vygotsky, 1978; Leontiev, 1977; Galperin,1966; Davydov, 1990; Koshmanova, 2007). To form civic values via the chosen method of peer mediation, the researcher created necessary conditions in which these qualities would be promoted and demonstrated. The first premise is connected with a need to create the environment built on the principles of civil society which stimulates and directs students toward demonstrating civic behavior (Vygotsky, 1978). In doing so, an instructor has to create the “we” feeling in this environment and ground it in students’ friendship and acceptance of each other. The second premise is based on the idea that students will build up these qualities effectively provided they experience the behavior which corresponds to the values the instructor wants them to develop. Thus, according to Vygotsky (1978), if these conditions are met, the students will achieve their zones of proximal development by acquiring adequate skills of self-regulating and self-organizing their behavior that would be based on expected values, and developing certain feelings about this society, as well as patterns of behavior. While developing values and patterns of behavior, they are going through the resolution of a socio-cognitive conflict (Koshmanova, 2009) which makes developmental impact on students with various levels of intellectual and moral development and promotes disappearance of differences in certain socio-cognitive characteristics of students from different social backgrounds.

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