Our contribution takes its point of departure in cultural historical activity theory (CHAT). In this paper we compare two traditions related to teaching/learning with roots in CHAT – developmental teaching and learning activity, as presented by Elkonin and Davydov – to characteristics identified by various representatives of epistemic practices. The issue of our paper is to explore in what ways the characteristics of epistemic practices can challenge and/or enrich principles related to developmental teaching and learning activities. While research that focuses developmental teaching points at teaching for development, research focusing learning activity instead points at students’ development of a desire to learn. This is a problem that needs to be solved within CHAT, as these two paths signal a tension related to whether teachers and students actually engage in the same activity or not - share the same object. Education in a CHAT-perspective is based on culturally and historically developed needs, which in different ways are transformed into different school subjects. With a focus on students’ learning, the teacher's task should be to engage students in an activity where they can re–discover the historically developed societal need for the knowledge developed in a specific subject