Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T21:29:27.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

20 - Designing, implementing, sustaining, and evaluating idiocultures for learning and development: The case study of the Fifth Dimension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Sevda Bekman
Affiliation:
Bogaziçi University, Istanbul
Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Affiliation:
Bogaziçi University, Istanbul
Get access

Summary

Of the multitude of contributions that Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı has made to our understanding of culture and human psychological development, I focus here on her achievements in the creation of development-promoting early childhood education. The work that I present does not approach in scale that which Professor Kağıtçıbaşı has accomplished in her native land of Turkey. However, I hope that the model underlying the project I describe will provide ways to think about two important issues facing developmentalists today. First, how to design development-enhancing environments for culturally diverse populations of children living in a wide variety of socio-ecological conditions. Second, how to create modes of higher education that will produce young practitioners who are capable of implementing and developing such environments.

Designing education after school

The first peculiarity of the approach adopted in the project described here is that it is designed to take place in the after-school hours. Consequently, it presupposes the existence of a society where schooling is pervasive, if not universal, and cultural circumstances where children's after-school hours are not highly institutionalized; rather, they are characterized by a great variety of arrangements, including participation in unsupervised play, attendance at various kinds of youth clubs, formal or informal sports activities, and various cultural enrichment activities such as music, dance, art, and the like.

It also presupposes that the society in question has a variety of institutions of post-secondary education, designed to train experts in a variety of knowledge required for participation in advanced industrialized societies with their expectations of high levels of literacy and numeracy, and specialized technical knowledge.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Belle, D., The After-school Lives of Children (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999).Google Scholar
Bronfenbrenner, U., Making Human Beings Human: Bio-ecologocial Perspectives on Human Development(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).Google Scholar
Butin, D. W. (ed.), Service-learning in Higher Education: Critical Issues and Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).CrossRef
Carnoy, M., Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family, and Community in the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Chaiklin, S. and Lave, J. (eds.), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1993).CrossRef
Cole, M., Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Cole, M. and the Distributed Literacy Consortium, The Fifth Dimension: An After-school Program Build on Diversity (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).Google Scholar
Cole, M., Cole, S., and Lightfoot, C., The Development of Children, Fifth edition (New York: Worth, 2004).Google Scholar
Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C., Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Eccles, J. and Gootman, J. A., Community Programs to Promote Youth Development: Committee on Community-level Programs for Youth (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Elkonin, D. B., “Toward the problem of stages in the mental development of the child,” in Cole, M. (ed.), Soviet Developmental Psychology (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1977), pp. 538–63.Google Scholar
Griffin, P. and Cole, M., “Current activity for the future: The zo-ped,” in B. Rogoff and J. Wertsch, V. (eds.), Children's Learning in the Zone of Proximal Development: New Directions for Child Development (No. 23) (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1984), pp. 45–64.Google Scholar
Halpern, R., “A different kind of child development institution: The history of after-school programs for low-income children,” Teachers College Record, 104 (2002), 178–211.CrossRef
Halpern, R., Making Play Work: The Promise of After-school Programs for Low-income Children (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A., Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Larson, R. and Verma, S., “How children and adolescents spend time across the world: Work, play, and developmental opportunities,” Psychological Bulletin, 125 (1999), 701–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lauer, P., Akiba, M., Wilkerson, S., Apthorp, H., Snow, D., and Martin-Glenn, M., The Effectiveness of Out-of-school-time Strategies in Assisting Low-achieving Students in Reading and Mathematics: A Research Synthesis, updated edition (Aurora, CO: Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, 2004 (www.mcrel.org/topics/productDetail.asp?productID=151).Google Scholar
Lave, J., Cognition in Practice (New York: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Leontiev, A. N., Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1978).Google Scholar
Newman, D., Griffin, P., and Cole, M., The Construction Zone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Newman, S., Fox, J. A., Flynn, E. A., and Christeson, W., America's After-school Choice: The Prime Time for Juvenile Crime or Youth Enrichment and Achievement (Washington, DC: Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, 2000).Google Scholar
Nicolopoulou, A. and Cole, M., “The Fifth Dimension, its play-world, and its institutional context: Generation and transmission of shared knowledge in the culture of collaborative learning,” in Forman, E. A., Minick, N., and Stone, C. A. (eds.), Context for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children's Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Piaget, J., “Piaget's theory,” in Mussen, P. (ed.), Charmichael's Manual of Child Psychology. Volume 1, Third edition (New York: Wiley, 1970), pp. 703–32.Google Scholar
Rogoff, B., The Cultural Nature of Human Development (London: Oxford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Sarason, S., “Revisiting the creation of settings,” Mind, Culture, & Activity, 4 (1997), 175–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vygotsky, L. S., Mind in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
Wertsch, J., Voices of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×