Thus, knowledge and context cannot be separated, else knowledge risks being seen by students as a result of learning rather than a set of tools for solving problems in the teaching and learning process (Rowe, Bozalek, & Frantz, 2013) which should engage the students in co-construction of knowledge. For example, Mishra and Koehler ( 2006) argued that learning should include meaningful knowledge construction within the same context in which that knowledge will be used. In the recent past, educators have changed their understanding of how learning should happen. The implications for this review for teachers in Uganda are active student engagement and creation of collaboration spaces for dialogue and interaction in the teaching and learning process. Secondly, although CHAT has been widely utilized in education research, scholarly articles that have employed it as their theoretical or analytical frameworks in a mathematics classroom context are still too few and yet still, the few that have utilized it have not exploited its maximum potential. Firstly, CHAT has been synonymously used with Activity Theory, leaving one wondering what actually the difference between the two in terms of researchers’ conceptualization is. Two major concerns arise out of this review. Specifically, it aimed at understanding the genesis of CHAT and further analyzing the studies that have employed CHAT as an analytical framework for teaching and learning in a mathematics classroom context. The purpose of this paper was to review literature on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and how it has been used to understand the mediation between emerging technologies and teaching and learning in a mathematics classroom.

Activity theory