Looking from a CHAT-IT perspective to undergraduate Mexican physics: organizational trajectories or professors as agents of change?

Recent elaborations on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engestrom et al., eds., Perspectives on activity theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and its relation to organizational theories have produced a theoretical amalgam of these earlier ideas, which allow for the exploration of learning in formal organizational contexts such as schools. In this paper I reflect on Candela's work situated in undergraduate Mexican physics by drawing attention to the CHAT-IT framework (Ogawa et al., Educational Researcher 37( 2): 83-95, 2008) as a viable lens. I suggest that it is important to understand the historical development of the Mexican university as an educational organization as well as the role of physics professors as agents of change whose practices contribute to not only breaking classroom walls but also to transforming the organization affecting future activity systems.