Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996
From: Gabriel Horenczyk
Subject: Review of Nicolopoulou and Cole

A review of:
Nicolopoulou, A., & Cole, M. (1993), "Generation and transmission of shared knowledge in the culture of collaborative learning: The Fifth Dimension, its play-world, and its institutional contexts." In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C. Stone (Eds.), Contexts for learning (pp. 283-314). New York: Oxford.

Zvi Bekerman (zvibek@jer1.co.il)
Gabriel Horenczyk (ghorencz@weber.ucsd.edu)
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Overview:
The authors attempt to situate institutional and cultural contexts within Vigotskian perspectives, which mostly until the present have dealt with dyadic pairs and face-to-face interaction. They contend that such a step is a natural outcome of the Vigotskian approach itself, which otherwise will remain limited in its scope and in its potential to contribute to a better understanding of the social context of development.

Through an analysis of the results of the implementation of the Fifth Dimension, an after-school educational program for elementary school children, in two different sites (a library and a Boys' and Girls' Club), Nicolopoulou and Cole situate and analyze small group interactions in the context of cultural institutional frameworks. The chapter presents, and supports, the view according to which knowledge, its creation and its transmission, can be seen as the product of collective collaborative achievement. The authors suggest as well a tool for studying collaborative learning. They conclude that different types of collaborative work influence cognitive development, and that such a collaborative activity is strongly affected by cultural institutional environments.

In another publication, Cole situates the work by him and his colleagues within the research orientation that characterizes the "Second Psychology" (Cahan & White, 1992); research work by the "second psychologists" combines the goals of theoretical understanding and practical results. Cole declares that the Fifth Dimension project is intended to deepen our understanding about the cultural mediation of mind and processes of cognitive development. On the other hand, it is designed to produce a change in everyday practices. It is with these premises in mind that we need to approach and evaluate this chapter and the research described in it.

The authors' project to go beyond the narrow focus of Vigotskian research on face-to-face interaction, so as to allow for a better understanding of the ways in which the social (broadly conceived, including the institutional) and the individual construct each other, is laudable. We think that it is in line with other calls that have been heard in the same direction, such as Cicourel's (1980) claim that the status of normative rules during social interaction still remains unclear in sociological research. Accordingly, Cicourel expects social sciences to be able to build the necessary bridges between micro- and macro-social phenomena. A step in this direction was taken by Moerman (1988) when carefully describing sequential organization of Thai conversation in order to investigate how social actions relate to the planning actor and how at times they relate to perduring institutions. From this perspective we realize that values, emotions, institutions, etc., are not only socially constructed but also locally invoked in what seems to be an ongoing micro-macro social dialogue. (This well touches upon some of the topics raised a while ago on xmca on individual and collective action.)

The chapter provides us with a detailed description of the Fifth Dimension program -- its rationale, goals and activities. The implementation of the program in two different sites is compared: a Boys' and Girls' Club (a nonprofit, privately funded youth center) and a library (a public institution, the community's branch of the county library system). The Fifth Dimension is described as "an activity system with a certain specific inner logic. The goal is to create a context that can promote collaborative learning and within which children themselves are motivated to progress step by step, so that they are actively involved in their own development rather than simply receiving information from other people" (pp, 291-2). All these components of the program are commendable, and they constitute much of what we would like to see in educational activities at all levels.

One additional aspect of Nicolopoulou and Cole's characterization of the program, however, seems to us to be somewhat problematic. The authors emphasize that the Fifth Dimension creates a make-believe world that is constituted by a system of ... shared and voluntarily accepted rules that are embedded in, and constitutive of, an ongoing practice". They suggest that the discipline of the structure ... "should rest not on the authority of individuals but on the authority of an impersonal normative system" (p. 292). It seems to us that in postmodern times claims about the impersonality of normative systems are hard to defend. In addition, the authors contend that rules not only constrain but enable and maintain group cohesion if they are shared and voluntarily chosen. However, it appears that the rules of the Fifth Dimension games were created not through sharing and were authored by someone; moreover, in the context of kids going for afterschool activity to a club or a library, the term 'voluntary choice' is not always clear.

The authors decided to take a game (conceived as on ongoing system of collective activity) as the basic unit of analysis, and recorded the scores achieved in a complex computer game played both at the Library and at the Boys' and Girls' Club . The results showed that the game "worked" much more successfully at the Library. After analyzing the different cultures that developed in the two sites, the authors concluded that "the degree of cognitive success and growth in the task activity ... depended on a collective characteristic of the group as a whole - - the strength or weakness of the culture of collaborative learning". A more tentative conclusion reached by the authors suggests that the strength or weakness of the culture of collaborative learning developed at each site can be explained in part by the degree of affinity between the internal culture of the Fifth Dimension program and the larger cultural environment of the host institution.

The authors indicate that knowledge, its creation and transmission can be seen as product of collective collaborative achievement which is influenced by cultural institutional environments. We submit to this claim, but we would like to suggest that pedagogical approaches should also be further investigated. We refer more specifically to work conducted in the field of informal education (e.g., Greenfield & Lave, 1987; Rapoport, 1989; Rapoport & Kahane, 1988). Although Greenfield and Lave tend to reject the "formal"-"informal" dichotomy on the basis that within cultural settings, educational institutions can (and indeed do) adopt educational strategies of both informal and formal education, it still seems that schools have been slow in adopting informal approaches such as the pedagogical organization of learning in the context of daily activities, teaching by demonstration, learning by observation and imitation -- strategies which seem to be part of the two educational contexts of the Fifth Dimension as described by Nicolopoulou and Cole.

The description of the ideal type of informal educational organizations provided by Rapoport and Kahane can also be relevant to the understanding (and eventually the improvement) of processes taking place within the Fifth Dimension. They list the following criteria for "informality" in educational institutions and programs: voluntarism, expressive instrumentalism, multiplexity of educational activities, symmetry between actors, moratorium which allows for trial and error and minimal social sanctions, and dualism which allows for the coexistence of different and even opposite behavioral orientations. Rapoport and Kahane suggest that the greater the level of informality within the socializing agency the greater the personal development of the participants and the longer the educational impact. Although their analysis refers more specifically to role development, it seems worth trying -- within the Fifth Dimension project -- to investigate whether these categories are reflected in the educational work carried out in the various sites, and in what ways (if at all) they influence the different institutional settings and are influenced by them.

References:
Cahan, E. D., & White, S. H. (1992). Proposals for a Second Psychology. American Psychologist, 47, 224-235.

Cicourel, A. (1980). Language and social interaction. Sociological Inquiry, 50, 1-30.

Greenfield, P., & Lave, J. (1982). Cognitive aspects of informal education. In D. A. Wagner & H. W. Stevenson (Eds.), Cultural perspectives on child development (pp. 181-207). San Francisco: Freeman.

Moerman, M. (1988). Talking culture: Ethnography and conversation analysis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Rapoport, T. (1989). Experimentation and control: A conceptual framework for the comparative analyis of socialization agencies. Human Relations, 42, 957-973.

Rapoport, T., & Kahane, R. (1988). Informal socialization agencies and role development. Sociological Inquiry, 58, 49-74.