Torrey Pines Elementary School
Started in 1996, The Fifth Dimension site at Torrey Pines Elementary currently consists of two programs. The first program runs during school hours with all of the 5th graders in the school, the other is conducted during afterschool hours primarily for children bused in from a lower-income, largely Latino, neighborhood south of I-5. The two implementations permit an analysis of the dynamics of activity within a 5thDimension as a function of ethnic group origins of the children and formal vs informal institutional arrangements. The Fifth Dimensions at Torrey Pines are characterized by high parent and teacher involvement and a high level of collaboration between parents, teachers, and university faculty. These networks of collaboration has made it possible to overcome a common weakness of Fifth Dimensions as research tools—we have not regularly had access to children’s academic performance. At Torrey Pines, however the relatively strong administrative structure has played a crucial role. The Principle, on his own, did the kinds of quantitative comparative analyses we ourselves required. It was he who came to us gloating about the evidence of the exceptional efficacy of the program. (Researchers: Virginia Gordon, Beth Ferholdt, Michael Cole)
SARAH-LCHC Fifth Dimenson Collaboration
SARAH is a Brazilian non-profit network of federally funded rehabilitation hospitals and related educational training institutes. SARAH-Brasília, the flagship of the network, plays a multifaceted role in teaching, administration and the delivery of clinical services designed to foster knowledge and medical advancement. The clinical conditions most frequently treated at the SARAH Network include: cerebral palsy, spina bifida, traumatic brain injury, stroke, spinal cord injury, neuromuscular diseases and orthopedic problems. The LCHC- SARAH/Brasilia collaboration began in 2002. During 2006-2007 the SARAH hospital in Brasilia implemented a version of the Fifth Dimension. (Co-PIs: Michael Cole & Lucia Braga).
La Clase Mágica (LCM) is a bilingual/bicultural adaptation of the Fifth Dimension model. It has primarily focused on working with Spanish-English bilingual children from Eden Gardens, a low-income recent immigrant Mexicano community in north San Diego County. (PI: Olga Vasquez)
University-Community Co-laboratory: Town and Country Learning Center
In the summer of 2007 a UC-links site was started in collaboration with the Education section of the UCSD Supercomputer (on the University side) and the Town and Country Learning Center, at HUD housing project, on the Community side. This project also mixes play, learning, and friendships among undergraduates, but it uses a strategy for inducing development that we think of as “mutual appropriation” – an interactive strategy in which the University participants begin by immersing themselves in their hosts’ ongoing activities in ways that the host deems beneficial and the two group develop a new program in common, using resources unique to each. Interesting in its own right, this line of research provides a natural contrast with the Fifth Dimension strategy, where community partners initially receive an attractive “activity package” from LCHC. The analytic objective in the Fifth Dimension strategy is to expose for analysis how the initial “seed” planted by the University onto Community “soil” is transformed over time as it continues to develop (or not) in the “garden” created by the partners. It is this contrast that makes this line of work especially interesting from a theoretical/methodological point of view. (i>Researchers: Diane Baxter, Camille Campion, Michael Cole, Robert Lecusay, Ivan Rosero)