The Fifth Dimension: An After-School Program Built on Diversity

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 Lessons Learned aving provided an account of our multiyear attempt to design, implement, and sustain Fifth Dimension–UC Links after-school programs and their associated courses in colleges and universities , it is time to return to our starting point to reflect on what we have accomplished , where we have failed, and the lessons others might draw from our experience. Our experience with the Fifth Dimension has strongly reinforced our belief that understanding issues of designing, implementing, and evaluating after-school activity programs requires constant attention not only to aspects of the activity designed for children but to the institutional arrangements that form the necessary context for the activity, as well as the historical and socio-ecological circumstances in which such efforts are carried out. Although all of these issues are simultaneously in play when we consider any example of an educational innovation, it is not possible to discuss them all at once. So for the sake of convenience, we discuss questions of design, implementation, evaluation, and socio-ecological circumstances sequentially. We end by discussing the contemporary circumstances of such efforts and their broader implications. QUESTIONS OF DESIGN As indicated at several points in this book, we saw in the after-school hours an opportunity to provide not only more “time on task” for standard school lessons but an entirely new kind of development-enhancing environment. Like others (Halpern 2003; Honig and McDonald 2005), we had come to believe that the unique contribution of after-school time is not to run homework rooms where children simply spend more time on preset tasks, just as they do when filling out their workbooks at school. Our own prior empirical research had demonstrated that failure to allow children to form goals (a dominant feature of classroom practices) decreases both transfer of knowledge and motivation to learn, especially for those H children whose family backgrounds do not socialize them into the normative school culture (Newman, Griffin, and Cole 1989). The challenge was to create forms of activity that would give children many opportunities to take initiative with respect to tasks that they found interesting while maintaining the adult goal of improving educational achievement. Now that we have taken a look at many Fifth Dimension programs based on the theoretical principles we proposed in chapter 2, it is appropriate to revisit our results to see how useful these ideas proved to be in practice. Taking Context into Account A primary consideration for Fifth Dimension programs is the importance of conducting the activity on weekday afternoons between the time children leave school and the time their parents arrive home for the evening (for recent discussions of this time in children’s lives, see Larson and Verma 1999; Noam 2003). From early in the twentieth century until the last few years, it has been widely assumed that children should be free to play during this period in their day, either unsupervised in their homes and neighborhoods or in adult-supervised settings (Halpern 2003). Moreover, many developmentalists have argued that such play is important to children ’s development (for a review, see Cole, Cole, and Lightfoot 2005). As we noted in chapter 1, side by side with this valorization of play has been concern that, left unsupervised, children get into mischief and fail to acquire the intellectual skills and social graces thought necessary for social success—in effect, that lack of supervision puts them at risk for a life of poverty and crime. By our analysis, the social demand that children’s after-school time be organized to amplify the experiences provided by the school and reduce crime created contradictions between several factors: • Adult beliefs in the efficacy of play and children’s desire to play after school • Adult suspicions of play combined with their fears about social order • Children’s distaste for the rigid social control practices characteristic of schools combined with their desire to escape adult control Consequently, our fundamental challenge was to design an activity that could overcome these contradictions by blending play with educational tasks in such a way that children would be drawn to it, as they are to play, THE FIFTH DIMENSION 172 while adults would view it as advancing their goals for social order and children’s development—particularly their educational achievement. Taking into Account Leading Activities According to the Vygotskian theoretical tradition, the periods of childhood enshrined in our educational structures are most fruitfully...