Chapter 2
 The Intellectual Foundations of the 5th Dimension

The materials summarized in Chapter 1 specify in broad outlines the goals we sought to achieve and the conditions we had to meet in order to achieve them. Our overall goals were : 1. To design, implement, and evaluate specially designed programs for children in the after school hours in order to address the general social need for enhanced educational experience in the after-school hours. 2. To implement these programs in such a way that they might be sustainable, e.g. become locally valued, institutional fixtures in their local communities.

The Family of Theoretical ideas

As we noted in Chapter 1, while there is considerable variation among the authors in the specific disciplinary backgrounds they brought to the design of their local systems we all adhered to a family of ideas that place a premium on the idea that individual development is a part of, and depends upon, participation in a social group. Within this family of theories, some theorists have focused on issues of institutionalized educational activities for children, others on the way in which learning is a natural byproduct in the collective activity of adults who are engaged in any valued cultural practice. As a result of their different foci and particular theoretical concerns, it is only natural that they would privilege different methods and deploy somewhat different concepts concerning processes of change.

Whatever label is used for the unit of analysis to study learning and development in this family of theories, it is agreed that activities/cultural practices/contexts/etc. need to be conceptualized as social systems composed of the interplay among persons as active subjects, their competing or complementary objectives, the mediational artifacts (tools) they deploy, the social rules they formulate and debate, the communities they form, and the divisions of labor that govern configurations of people's joint actions (Engeström 1987; Lave, 1988; Leont'ev, 1981; Moll, 2000; Rogoff, 2003).


The structure of a human activity system (from Engestrom, 1987, p. 78)

A natural correlate of this focus on settings/context/practices as units of analysis is that in place of a focus on individual abilities and actions they view human cognition (to use Jean Lave¹s felicitous phrase) as ³stretched over, not divided among, mind, body, activity, and culturally organized settings (including other actors) (Lave, 1988, p. 1). This is not to say that one cannot focus on individuals and individual change, but rather that one should strive always to conduct such analysis in relation to features of the system of which they are a part (Rogoff, 2003). Jay Lemke makes this relational view explicit when he links activity, modes of participation, processes of learning, and individual identities:

Our activity, our participation, our "cognition" is always bound up with the participation and activity of Others, be they persons, tools, symbols, processes, or things. How we participate, what practices we come to engage in, is a function of the whole community ecology . . . As we participate, we change, our identity-in-practice develops, for we are no longer autonomous Persons in this model, but Persons-in-Activity (1997, p 38).

The Centrality of Context

Given our emphasis on the need to approach the study of learning and development with respect to the setting-situation-context-activity within which it occurs it is only natural that in order to understand why the 5th Dimensions routinely took on certain common characteristics while varying in other respects, we should begin our discussion with the notion of context.

However, we do so somewhat cautiously, because as many scholars sympathetic to this perspective have noted (and as our own somewhat awkward used of hyphenated combinations of cognate terms indicates) notions such as context, activity, setting, and situation are used in a variety of ways by contemporary social scientists, any one of which can lead to misunderstandings (Chaiklin & Lave, 1993; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). With such potential for misunderstanding in mind, we will try to be as explicit as possible about the way in which we use such terms along with the virtues and potential errors that can arise from their use.

With respect to the concept of context we have found it useful to adopt two somewhat different notions, depending upon the purposes at hand. The first might be termed a "social-ecological" concept of context, ordinarily represented as a set of concentric circles in which the focal activities are at or near the center, constituted by and constituting the levels above and below them (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998; Cole, 1996) (See Figure 1).

The image of concentric circles is helpful in capturing the embeddedness of the interactions between undergraduates and children engaged in joint activities with computers and various games at a specific time and place in a more inclusive setting, the activity we call the 5th Dimension; this "micro" level of the system is symbolized by two people interacting with each other using an artifact, in this case, a computer game. At the next level one attends to the relation of these two-three-or four party interactions to the ensemble of such interactions that constitute the local program, whatever its name ( a "5th Dimension," "Club Proteo," or "La Clase Mágica," for example); at the next level, the program is seen as one element within a larger institution (youth club, church, school, etc.); at the next level, one is led to consider the program and its institutional context as part of a neighborhood ecology, a school district which channels children into after-school clubs, a community the school district serves, and so on. Depending upon which particular issue we are dealing with, different levels of the system will become the focus of attention, but the presence of all the others needs to be retained in so far as possible.

For example, an important common feature of 5th Dimensions considered at the ³3rd level² of context, as a coherent system of activity in a community setting, is that the program runs after school. As Robert Halpern pointed out, historically "after-school hours emerged gradually as discretionary time, a counterpoint to the rigid schedule and adult agenda of schools, and from the perspective of adult-child relations, as negotiated time" (2002, p. 180). In middle class culture, lessons in dance, music, seasonal sports leagues, or scouting are standard fare for those with the resources (Reed and Varma, 199x, p. ***). For many children it is a time to attend one of a variety of loosely structured after school care programs which are generally designed to keep children safe, active and engaged in satisfying activities until their parents can pick them up (Belle, 1999).

Recognizing that 5th Dimensions are located "in the context between home and school" immediately specifies an important design requirement. The program must provide a variety of sources of motivation for children¹s participation or they will not come. Play is, of course, one such source of motivation, but affiliation, peer interaction, and learning are also obvious candidates which we will discuss in more detail below (Griffin & Cole, 1984; Leontiev, 1978).

Promoting play was a particularly prominent objective in 5th Dimension design both for the practical advantage that it would attract children and because in Vygotsky's theory, play promotes development (Vygotsky, 1978). The introduction and use of computer games and other playful 5th Dimension artifacts followed from this objective.

However, the particular way in which play is incorporated within a given 5th Dimension requires attention to a different level of context ­ the relationship of the 5th Dimension to its local institutional context. So, for example, the introduction of play into an after-school setting is very likely to be carried out somewhat differently than incorporation of a 5th Dimension into a library or a school or a for-profit tutoring company. (As we noted early in the project, a 5th Dimension in a library is both quieter than a 5th Dimension in a neighboring Boys and Girls Club and noisier than the other activities being carried out in other parts of the library at the time, Nicolopoulou and Cole, 1993).

A second conception of the term, context, which has proven its value in designing and implementing 5th Dimensions, is the notion of context as the weaving together of many elements over time. Context conceived of in this way helps to capture the dynamics of interaction that change from day to day in what would otherwise be considered "the same context" when viewed in terms of the embedded circles representation. On a day to day basis it makes a difference which and how many children and undergraduates are present and in what order they appeared at the activity, because the particular pairings of children and undergraduates is shaped by the relationships they have built over time and who is available or in need of help at any given moment. Those social arrangements, in turn, must be woven together with the availability of particular games, the condition and occupancy rate of the equipment needed to run them (computers prove amazingly unreliable in this regard, but checker boards and chessmen have a way of disappearing at odd times as well).

Of course, such weaving together involves different "levels of context" as interpreted within the concentric figures model. When undergraduates arrive sleepless from all night study sessions before a mid-term or schools have teacher conference days so that attendance of children is greatly reduced, the overall qualities that emerge from the weaving together of the program¹s elements differ in noticeable, but often unpredictable ways. It is not uncommon, for example, for an undergraduates to indicate in their fieldnotes that they arrived exhausted and anxious, but ended up having a great time with the kids and left energized. Alternatively, an 11 year old boy set on showing an 18 year old girl that she is subhuman owing to her lack of knowledge of Sim City can produce a confrontational outcome that, while it may end amicably and provide an important learning experience for both the child and the undergraduate, obviously creates a very different emotional tone. The fact that the "weaving together" notion of context keeps one alive to the constant need for dealing with the heterogeneous mixture of factors operating during every implementation of and with experience alerts the designer to the need to plan for the unexpected as a part of the design process. Such advice is ordinarily an oxymoron, but not with respect to 5th Dimension design.

Despite its manifest usefulness, there are limits to how far the concept of context can take us in designing 5th Dimensions. The metaphors of levels and threads are helpful at an abstract level, but we also need a less abstract and sturdy set of concepts to guide design as a complement to the emphasis on spontaneity and flexibility that is such an attractive feature of the use of context to describe and analyze 5th Dimensions.

For example, it might be thought that there really isn't any significant design problem. Perhaps its only common sense that mixing of play with educational games and the presence of undergraduates in an after-school program would be sufficient to explain the recurrent properties of the 5th Dimension. Would that such were the case! It would simplify the decision making of policy makers no end. But there is nothing automatic about creating successful after-school programs by putting together play, educational games, and college-age supervisors. For example, Bianca Dahl (2000) contrasted the 5th Dimension program conducted in a Boys and Girls Club with a commercial after-school educational system ("Score") run for profit as a subsidiary of Kaplan, the large company that specializes in test preparations. The systems were very similar at one level of description: after-school, mixed play with learning, included young adult mentors. But descriptions of the children's reactions at Score and the 5th Dimension differed to a startling degree. The fieldnotes from Score sessions were replete with children crying from frustration, the need for disciplinary action, and anxiety. At Score children needed to raise their hands to interact with an undergraduate mentor. While play and education were co-present, peer interaction and affiliation were explicitly discouraged. Moreover, the way in which play and education were mixed was strikingly different. In the 5th Dimension, play and learning were interwoven in myriad ways, while the Score program used a Skinnerian-style reward system, in which children were allowed to leave their computers and shoot basketballs at hoops when they achieved a certain level of proficiency at the educational challenge being presented on the computer .

In these circumstances, children competed vigorously with each other and parents, who paid significant amounts of money for the program, were often present to ensure that their children were getting the academic benefits they were paying for. Parental anxiety was converted into children¹s anxiety, and mentors had to spend a significant amount of time calming down children who became too upset to continue.

Such extreme problems never occurred in the 5th Dimension. At most, a child might become upset because they lost a game or could not get access to the computer or undergraduate they wanted, but the entire "structure of feeling" (Williams, 19??) was different. Without going into details on the features of the Score program that seemed to account for the marked differences between the two programs are sufficient to indicate that simple invocations of "context" to explain why the 5th Dimensions functioned as they did are insufficient (see Dahl, 2000 for more details). Something more is needed, and for that something more, we draw upon principles developed with the family of sociocultural theories mentioned above.

Going Beyond Context in the Design Process

While common sense may urge upon us the need to provide for play as a major motive for children in the after school hours, and funding sources plus our own good intentions urged upon us the need to infuse the activity with learning opportunities, many design tasks remained. We have already mentioned one -- how should play and educational activities be combined to maximum effect. But there were many more. For example, focused as it was on the elementary school children whatever mixture of activities we came up with would need to appeal to children between the ages, roughly, of 5-12 years of age, which means spanning three conventional developmental stages: early and middle childhood, and the transition to adolescence; all theories of learning and development we know of assume that the proclivities of children with respect to play and instruction differ markedly across this age span.

Focused, as we were, on children who struggled in school, but working in after-school settings where all of the community's children were welcome, we also needed to design the activities so that they would be attractive to children of widely varying academic ability and cultural background. Moreover, we had to meet our universities' expectations that 5th Dimension activity would provide high quality education for the undergraduate participants and playing computer games with children after school is not the first thing that is likely to leap to a college administrator's mind when she thinks about a serious laboratory course. To add to complexities emanating from the college/university side of each system was the fact that several different kinds of departments were involved, so that the special interests (for example) of students who were in a Teacher Education versus a Communication Department could be met adequately.

A series of conceptual tools provided by different contributors to the overall sociocultural, activity-based framework, proved to be useful tools to accomplish this complex task of coordinating widely varying ages, abilities, cultural backgrounds, and motives for participation.

Mixing Leading Activities

So far we have focused on play and learning as two sources of motivation around which 5th Dimension activities were organized, and left open the issue of how to mix them for children varying in age and other demographic characteristics. In order to address the issue of how to go beyond the domains of play and education to design the activities to incorporate this diversity, we found it useful to draw upon the concept of "leading activities," as it was developed in the Russian cultural-historical tradition by Vygotsky and his students (See Griffin & Cole, 1984, for an extended summary and examples). In the Russian cultural-historical tradition, stages of development are interpreted in terms of the kinds of activity that dominate the lives of children at a given age. Associated with each age period is a different leading activity each characterized by a distinctive source of motivation.

From birth to early childhood, attachment to others is considered the leading activity. Play is the leading activity of early childhood, learning of middle childhood, peer interaction of the transition to adolescence and work in the transition to adulthood. (Elkonin, ????). Crucial to making use of this way of thinking about development was recognition that as children develop, prior activities and their associated motives do not disappear. The desire to be accepted and loved by members of one's social group, for example, does not disappear among preschoolers any more than the desire to play disappears one children enter school. Rather, prior "leading activities" become everyday activities that remain as the foundation upon which the new form of activity is built. The design implication of this insight meant that we should create programs that provided access to all of the leading activities as rich a variety of motives from which different children could choose according to their personal preferences.

For example, undergraduates were not assigned to work with particular children and typically worked with a variety of children during their participation in the 5th Dimension. But undergraduate fieldnotes attest to the many close attachments that formed between undergraduates and children who sought each other out and expressed their pleasure at being together and sadness at parting.

As noted earlier, promoting play was a particularly prominent objective in 5th Dimension design both for practical reasons and because in Vygotsky's theory, play promotes development (Vygotsky, 1978). The introduction and use of computer games as a contemporary medium for mixing play and education followed from this combinations of objectives. But we needed to be sensitive to the fact that preferred forms of play and plays relation to other motives change with age.

In principle it is perhaps imaginable that one could design and run a 5th Dimension in which every room of the maze contained age-graded games. We in fact sought to implement this idea to the extent possible. However, from prior remarks concerning actual dynamics of any given 5th Dimension session, the reader already knows that a high level of heterogeneity with respect to participants, working hardware, ages and amount of experience of the children present, the ratio of undergraduates to children (to name a few standard factors frequently in flux) is the norm, not an exception. If we were to come up with the right conditions for maximizing learning and development, we need ways to combine insights into leading activities with the actual social organization of participants interactions with each other. Here additional theoretical principles become essential

The Social Creation of Individual Development: The Role of Intergenerational Participation

We have already mentioned that the participation of undergraduates served as a critical resource for staffing 5th Dimensions at minimal cost to the community host institution and their role as a source of motivation for the children. Here we want to look more closely at how theory guided us in organizing the roles of the undergraduates as they attempted to regulate the quality of interaction around the many tasks that children carried out during a 5th Dimension session to optimize learning and development. For this task, concepts such as Vygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development, " Rogoff's "guided participation," and Lave and Wenger's "legitimate peripheral participation" all served as resources.

Presupposed in all of these formulations is the general proposition that participation in a social group is essential to development. Vygotsky formulated the idea of the social origins of individual psychological development -- what he called the "general law of social development" as follows : Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological) (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57).

The implications of this idea for design of after-school activities are clear. There must be a functioning "social level" that includes novices and more experienced members and a social setting to provide everyone with relevant goals and to support their participation or there can be no opportunity for appropriation of more mature, "social level" functions by novices. Since the more adept participants are actively engaged in pursuing socially goals that overlap substantially with less adept participants (e.g., trying to catch the theif in "Carmen San Diego") inclusion of the novices simultaneously provides them the opportunity to learn and contribute (or at least, do not detract from) the goal directed actions of the adepts. It is this characteristic of behavior in social institutions that Lave and Wenger formulated as the process of "legitimate peripheral participation".

This characterization of the 5th Dimension also fits well with Rogoff's (1994) concept of a community of learners, a community in which "both mature members of the community and less mature members are conceived as active; no role has all the responsibility for knowing or directing, and no role is by definition passive²"(p. 213). She adds that members fluidly move between the roles of teacher and learner, more experienced and less experienced peer, as all reciprocally "learn through engagement with others (in a system of ongoing guidance and support) in the everyday mature activities in their community" (pp. 216-217).

For Vygotsky, arrangement of the social interactions involving more and less capable participants was of paramount importance, both as a means of assessing the gap between inter and intrapsychological planes of different participants (in his case, teachers and their pupils) and for organizing ways to take advantage of this gap. It is in this context that he formulated the notion of a "zone of proximal development" as "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).

With respect to 5th Dimensions, this idea provides important guidance for the behavioral norms for the undergraduates. The undergraduates should seek to play the role of "more capable peer." (Note that this excludes them adopting the role of teacher). Creating the right conditions for them to play such a role entailed several different factors. First, while specific labels varied from one site to another, the role of the undergraduates was designated by term that minimized their perceived authority. Undergraduates were referred to by staff using terms such as "Wizard¹s Assistant," "Amiga/amigo" or "intern." Second, the undergraduates were explicitly told that they were present to play with the children as model 5th Dimension students and not to be tutors, the role likely to be used initially by staff at the community sites and university administrators to describe the undergraduate's roles. Third, undergraduates were explicitly told that they should not adopt the role of authority figure with respect to children's social behavior. That is, if conflicts arose among children or between the undergraduate and the child, the undergraduate was asked to defer to the site coordinator and to intervene directly on in cases where safety was an immediate and obvious issue.

Other design features of the 5th Dimension helped to maintain undergraduates' roles as peers. For one thing, at the beginning of any given academic semester or quarter the undergraduates were actually less capable than children who were long time participants in the 5th Dimension in knowing how to play the games and in knowing how to "play the 5th Dimension." Many fieldnotes from undergraduates during early weeks of participation attest to their chagrin at their own ignorance and desire to become more adept as quickly as possible. In addition, we provided undergraduates with a rule of thumb for the perennial question of how much help they should provide for the children that has proven a useful heuristic in helping the undergraduates to create zopeds: "Give as little help as you can, but enough so that both you and the child are having a good time."

As a consequence of such measures, data from the interactions at 5th Dimensions indicate that daily interactions are filled with affectively positive interactions in which zones of proximal development are routinely created. At the same time, Rogoff's idea of fluid reversals of student and teacher role in communities of learners could be seen to arise naturally by virtue of the inter-institutional arrangements that made 5th Dimensions possible in the first place.

These same arrangements solved a problem identified by Lave and Wenger in their discussion contrasting a teaching curriculum with a learning curriculum. In Lave and Wenger's terms, a learning curriculum consists of situated opportunities (including, especially, various opportunities to form goals) for the improvisational development of new practices. According to Lave (1989), "a learning curriculum is a field of learning resources in everyday practice viewed from the perspective of learners. A teaching curriculum, by contrast, is constructed for the instruction of newcomers. When a teaching curriculum supplies -- and thereby limits -- structuring resources for learning, the meaning of what is learned . . . is mediated by an instructor's view, by an external view of what knowing is about" (p. 97).

5th Dimensions appear to undermine, and at times to dissolve, the distinction between learning and teaching curricula. On the one hand, the adult designers and implementers have certain educational goals in mind. And teaching in the form of explanations and suggestions of strategies, and encouragement, certainly goes on all the time. On the other hand, the children have multiple opportunities to change both the content and conditions of the activity and as indicated above, are often in the position of teacher vis-a-vis the undergraduates as learner. Consequently, while 5th Dimensions are not child initiated, child-run institutions, the social arrangements of their implementation provide a more reasonable balance between teacher and learner viewpoints.

The Centrality of Mediational Means for Organizing Activity

While understand the overall context and ideas about the social organization required to maximize learning and development are critical to the design of 5th Dimensions, the needed organizational properties could not be attained if we did not have a systematic way to various deliberately constructed mediational means (tools) that could be used in the efforts of all the participants to regulate their interactions with each other in pursuit of their personal goals (Kozulin, 19??; Wertsch, 1987). Here we will describe a number of the more widely used mediational means common to several sites. In addition, each site developed its own tools to suit its own local conditions.

Computers

Of course, the most obvious mediational means were computers and computer networks, the former as the media for children to a variety of games ranging from the purely recreational to the more-or-less deliberately educational, the latter as potential media for children at different sites to interact with each other and essential media for collaboration of the researchers with each other.

The particular computers used at a site depended a great deal on what was available and availability differed wildly from one site to another. A site on the Appalachian State University campus had advanced DOS machines at the same time that other sites located in schools around Appalachian State had less powerful machines. La Clase Magica, which is located in mission in a working class community had a hodgepodge of computers of various types, depending upon what their university partner and local donors could provide. Some sites had Internet access, some did not.

Variability ruled not only with respect to hardware, but, consequently, of software as well. The more powerful the computer, the glitzier the software that it could run. However, this source of variability was overshadowed by another source‹unless we developed the software ourselves, we were at the mercy of commercial entertainment, edutainment, and educational software makers as sources of raw curriculum materials. We already knew we had to mix play and education with possibilities for attachment and peer interaction in our computer-centered activities, but we could not depend upon off the shelf software to provide us with what we needed. Hence, one of our primary tools needed a set of auxiliary means of its own in order to function properly.

Task Cards

The tool created to regulate the relation between play and education as well as the difficulty of engaging the software, mentioned in the first paragraph of the ideal-type in Chapter 1 were "task cards" (in some places referred to as ³adventure guides² or other labels that made them more inviting). In principle, every time a child engaged a 5th Dimension game, engagement was mediated by a task card that specified what had to be accomplished to get credit for beginner, good, or excellent performance with respect to the activity in question. Gaining credit for a pre-specified number of goods and excellent was the criterion for promotion to the role of Young Wizard/Maga/Golem/etc. assistant.

In addition to shifting control of what counted as high level performance away from the software designer toward 5th Dimension designers, the task cards accomplished several goals:

The next mediational means to appear in the ideal type is the maze, a virtual space containing all the games and other tasks that are an official part of the 5th Dimension. The presence of a maze with multiple rooms can be seen to accomplish several key functions:

The Mythical Figurehead

The ideal 5th Dimension description in Chapter 1 also makes reference to a mythical figurehead (Wizard, Maga, Golem, Proteo, etc.) said to be the patron of the Fifth Dimension. The mythical figurehead fulfills several functions.

It helps to ensure an element of play even as children engage in what otherwise might appear to be a learning task, such as reading instructions for an educational game because by subordinating themselves to the Wizard, the adults can collude with the children in the pretense of the Wizard's existence and thereby play with them.

In addition to these more or less universal mediational means, each site, of course, invents tools of its own. One site may use a "hints book" to which children and undergraduates add hints about good strategies for dealing with different games. Where in use, this tool affords the idea that information can be accumulated in the 5th Dimension community so that when the going get tough, the smart 5th Dimension participant knows where to look for the answers. Another site created merit badges, another has bilingual task cards that help children who can't read well, but speak English, and undergraduates who read just fine, but do not understand Spanish to negotiate meaningful goals and strategies as the work/play together.

The Centrality of Communicative Practices

Implicit in much of the forgoing is our belief that the development of communication skills in many media is of positive intellectual benefit to the children. There are many theoretical justifications for emphasizing communication skills. For example, Vygotsky is perhaps best known for placing communication, the mediation of activity through language and other "psychological tools," at the center his theory of language, thought, and development. In arguing that "the thought is completed in the word" he focused attention on the intellectual importance of communication and the necessary active, goal-oriented behavior of learners as central to the process of education.

He is equally well known for the emphasis he placed on the process of internalization, through which external experience shaped by its sociocultural structure and dynamics is transformed into individual experience. The emphasis on teaching others what you have learned as a part of task mastery embodies both of these directions of intellectual influence through communication; both the need to convert tacit, intuitive, figurative knowledge into concepts understandable by another and the need actively to interpret instructions of another, who may not be a particularly adept communicator.

Therefore, in designing 5th Dimension activities, we paid close attention to arranging interactions where adult and child participants had to pause to comment on their problem solving efforts in oral or written reflections in addition to engaging in an ongoing dialogue as they worked together on whatever problem was the focus of the moment.

The Importance of Goal Formation

From prior work conducted in classrooms, as well as from literature on the formation of school settings (Sarason, 1982, 1996), project members shared another principle: the importance of insuring that participants be engaged in such a way that they have many opportunities to form the goals for their own actions. This principle affected both the design of activities within our various community settings and to the issue of sustaining the systems over time.

This emphasis on goal formation at the level of individual children was prompted by research demonstrating that when children's learning is tightly controlled in terms of pre-specified goals and procedures, the resulting learning does not transfer widely to other problems where it is relevant (Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989). Therefore, we maximize goal formation in the 5th Dimension by arranging for children to choose what games they want to play and what level of expertise they wish to achieve. Sometimes goals are fixed within the games themselves so to ensure options for children, we add additional goals achievable by using a task card to reach a higher level of expertise and we add the ready-made goal of achieving the status of a "Wizard's assistant," which is rewarded by such measures as the right to choose a new game for inclusion in the 5th Dimension maze. However, there is no fixed order for achieving such goals and children are given choices of games, partners, specific goals (often not those intended by the designers, such as seeing how many ways one could destroy a city in "Sim City") and of course, the choice not to participate.

At the level of institutional cooperation, the need for engaging participants in the goal formation process was met differently by different researchers, depending upon the time they had available for planning and the specifics of institutional arrangements. Common to all of the specific systems was that each adaptation of the prototype model was intended to be a cooperative effort between people affiliated with universities and people affiliated with community institutions. Such collaborations require what Olga Vasquez (1994) refers to as "dynamic relations of exchange". Whether the point of view considered is that of a child, an undergraduate, a parent, a 5th Dimension site staff member, a university administrator or research associate, we have found that each participant has to have sufficient motivation to commit time and resources to the 5th Dimension endeavor. Each has to experience their involvement and their efforts to be preferable to existing alternatives. For this to happen, a solid understanding of the authentic motives, constraints and resources of the varied participants is key. Consequently, it became important for participants to begin by seeking to establish common goals for a 5th Dimension site within a particular partnership.

At the highest level this was easy: All of the community institutions were focused on after- school activities and wanted enriched educational experiences for their children.. This was the object of the program. But when it came to sub- goals necessary for achieving the joint undertaking, something like "joint goal formation" was often difficult to achieve, although we all recognized it as a primary condition for the continued existence of the 5th Dimension program. As we will see in later chapters, the failure to identify a sufficiently rich reservoir of common goals initially, or to form them in the early stages of the process, bode ill for the longevity of the program. But even when there were common goals and good will, pressing local institutional needs, turnover in personnel (which often meant loss of memory of the goal formation process), and differing time schedules for vital functions raised significant problems, and in some cases, the demise of a 5th Dimension system.

Voluntary Participation of Children

Writing in the early 1930's, Alexander Luria (1932) made a compelling case that the optimal conditions for gaining access to the thoughts of other people arose when people were engaged in joint, voluntary, activities that were highly coordinated, so that discoordinations were selective and highly diagnostic. When children are forced to engage in activities they dislike, their behavior is likely to be disruptive, creating impossible conditions for accurate psychological diagnosis of their learning difficulties and poor conditions for promoting their future development.

Our focus on after-school activities had not only the virtue of providing enrichment and reinforcement of educational experience, but did so under conditions that maximized the possibility for psychological diagnosis and promotion of the children¹s welfare. Similarly, undergraduate and graduate student participants usually elected to participate in the 5th Dimension classes or in voluntary development of independent research projects. The nature of their role, therefore, though less open than the role of the children, allowed for both diagnosis of learning barriers and the promotion of the students' welfare.

Privileging diversity

This principle is strongly implied by those that have gone before, but it needs to be explicitly stated. From the theoretical perspective guiding this work, every activity system can be expected to differ from every other one in key respects, even when they are located in similar institutional settings in a single socioeconomic and ethnic social ecology. However, the activity systems we constructed were not all set within identical, or even similar, institutional settings on either the college/university or the community sides, nor did they all operate with the same socioeconomic/ethnic groups. Hence, local adaptation was assumed to be a necessary condition for all 5th Dimension systems.

On the one hand, as previously noted, researchers and implementers were encouraged to adapt systems to their local goals and to the institutional contexts, activity priorities, and resources of their local college/university and community institution. Different organizational arrangements and divisions of labor in university-community partnerships thus evolved from site to site. This meant the evolution of different divisions of labor among university-community partnerships at different sites and the privileging of issues of local concern. Focusing on bicultural-biliteracy issues, for example, was central at some sites but not others. Focus on issues of technology was more central in some cases than others.

On the other hand, researchers and implementers were encouraged to adapt systems to the social-cultural-economic ecology of the local community. In particular, this meant designing site content and activities that engaged the cultural and linguistic practices, or funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992, 1999), of participating children and families. The imperative for this kind of adaptation derived not only from the goal of creating accessible, appealing, and sustainable local systems. It also derived from our other theoretical principles, which point consistently to participants' cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge as essential resources for promoting learning and development.

Privileging diversity and honoring adaptation thus encouraged local partnerships to join their own key principles with the six described here. The openness to diversity of the 5th Dimension design permitted attention and analysis directed at both global and local issues. At the same time, borrowing back and forth of ideas that worked was also encouraged, leading to an appreciation of the local creativity of each system, which then became a resource for local sustainability. The design implications of diversity, adaptation, and borrowing will become visible in Chapter 3, which provides thumbnail histories of the original Mellon sites, and in Chapter 8, which discusses post-Mellon expansion of the 5th Dimension.

Finally, this emphasis on diversity underlined the fact that authority for conduct of local activities was a local responsibility. There was/is no "central command" which directs activities at all the sites; power at the level of researcher interaction was also distributed.

Culture

Taken one at a time, the various principles generated a rich tool kit for seeking to accomplish the goals of the 5th Dimension. But, of course, the principals were never taken one at a time in practice. They were all involved in the planning and implementation of the activities simultaneously. The success of any implementation on any given occasion depends crucially on how the various artifacts and practices generated by these principles were synthesized into a meaningful, whole, activity. The concept which best captures the wholistic nature of the activities in real time is culture.

In its most general use, culture usually refers to the social inheritance of a group which is transmitted by each generation to its progeny. In the work of our distributed Literacy Consortium, we have made deliberate use of this conventional conception of culture as well as a more restricted concept, "idioculture" which seems especially suited to discussion of the unique forms of social inheritance that occur over generations of children and undergraduates interacting within a 5th Dimension. At the more general level, several of our consortium members have designed their local 5th Dimensions with the culture of the local population in mind. This is true, for example, of Olga Vasquez's development of La Clase Magica, where rooms in the maze are named for people and places of special significance to the Mexicano population where her program is located and the language on the task cards includes varying mixtures of English and Spanish to promote the goal of bilingual, biculturalism

However, whatever the cultural characteristics of the population among whom a 5th Dimension has been created, culture operates at a far more intimate, local level in a manner which may be shaped by, but is by no means determined by, the sociocultural context of the community. The conditions for the development of local cultural formations associated with small groups was specified many years ago by Rose and Felton (1955). They found that whenever a group of people come together to engage in some form of joint activity, its members quickly begin to invent new vocabulary and ways of doing things (routines), shared values, and shared goals. Gary Alan Fine (1987, p. 124) referred to this process as cultural formation, where culture is now understood to include "the meaningful traditions and artifacts of a group; ideas, behaviors, verbalization, and material objects." Fine called the cultural form that emerges in a small group an idioculture:

[a] system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer and that serve as the basis of further interaction. Members recognize that they share experiences, and these experiences can be referred to with the expectation they will be understood by other members, thus being used to construct a reality for the participants (p.125).

This description closely fits the conditions that arise in every new 5th Dimension. The culture that grows at each 5th Dimension is unique: each is characterized by its own customs, specific goals, values, lexicon and conditions of existence. At the same time, however, there are also certain common features that are discernible wherever a 5th Dimension takes root as a result to the application of a common tool kit of principles for their construction.

Summary

To summarize, a 5th Dimension is a system that:

• Motivates participation and situates learning in everyday cultural activities -- especially, for children, play -- centered around computers.

• Promotes Intergenerational collaboration in which the roles of teacher and learner are flexibly shared among participants diverse not only in age and educational experience but in gender, culture, language, and socioeconomic status.

• Encourages participants' formulation of personal goals through recurrent choices, including the choices of whether or not to participate, what activities to do, and at what level of expertise.

• Promotes using a wide range communicative practices and artifacts-- including culturally valued ³psychological tools² -- as mediating means for satisfying diverse motives and achieving personal goals.

• Purposively expands activities to create numerous occasions for reflection on problem solving efforts through dialogue and writing.

* Honors local contexts and human diversity in site development.

• Promotes Intergenerational collaboration in which the roles of teacher and learner are flexibly shared among participants diverse not only in age and educational experience but in gender, culture, language, and socioeconomic status.

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