Activity Theory as a Paradigm and Research Program for Veterinary, Animal, and Health-Sciences Education
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This article argues that activity theory can be treated, for education in veterinary medicine, animal science, and the health professions, as both a candidate Kuhnian paradigm and a Lakatosian research program. The argument is not that behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism were useless or simply false. Their durable contributions are preserved: behaviorism clarifies feedback, practice, and observable performance; cognitivism clarifies representation, reasoning, and problem solving; constructivism clarifies active meaning making and learner participation. Their limitation is that each takes a partial moment of learning as the center of the whole. Activity theory surpasses them by taking collective, object-oriented, culturally mediated activity as the unit of analysis. It therefore connects performance, cognition, identity, tools, rules, community, division of labor, and historical development within one explanatory framework. Enriched by Bedny’s systemic-structural theory of activity, this paradigm becomes operational for curriculum design, simulation, clinical education, research training, and program evaluation. In veterinary and animal-science education, it reframes competencies as participation in activity systems such as diagnosis, herd-health consulting, surgery, nutrition planning, public health surveillance, and research translation. In health-professions education more broadly, it explains why authentic objects of work, mediating artifacts, distributed responsibility, and developmental trajectories are not optional methods but structural conditions for professional formation.
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