Idiocultural Design as a Tool of Cultural Psychology

DRAFT Jan 11, 2017
Idiocultural Design as a Tool of Cultural Psychology
Michael Cole

Professor Sternberg's instructions to the authors of this
special issue read, in part, " your focus should be on what we can
learn from cultural psychology that we could not learn from research
that ignores culture." In what follows I will attempt to do just
that, but my way of going about may seem a bit odd, so I offer a brief
"pre-amble."
When one picks up a fine introductory book with the title,
Cultural Psychology (Heine, 2008) one is greeted on the front cover by
photographs of people and places around the world, with the map of the
world in the center. That is, culture is viewed on the scale of all
the world's peoples. Inside, two definitions of culture, or two ways
of thinking about culture, are offered. The first focuses on the
passing of information between individuals. From this perspective,
culture is "any kind of idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice
that is acquired through learning from others" (p. 3). The second
focuses on groups of individuals: "Cultures are people who are
existing within some kind of shared context" (p. 3).
The study of cultures as groups of people, when studied in a
global context, Heine suggests, face three challenges:
1. Its not always clear where the boundaries of the group are to
be found. Such uncertainty vitiates conclusions about cultural
differences because of culture's fluid nature and the porous nature of
its borders.
2. Cultures change over time; they are dynamic and ever
changing.
3. Within-culture variation is the norm.
In the early decades of my career I pursued the study of human
cultural variation in terms of Heine's first way of thinking about
culture.[1] But for the past three decades my empirical research has
focused on the second of Heine's two ways of looking at culture, as a
group of people engaged in joint activity in its institutional
context. Concerns with the development of knowledge appear in this
work as the content of the groups' concerns. Although focused on the
problem of culture in development, this research was not carried out
within a framework that studies culture at the level of the nation
state or the exotic other. Rather, it studies groups of people of
mixed ages who have come together to participate in an afterschool
program consisting of a wide variety of games brought together in a
fantasy world watched over by a Wizard. My basic claim is that the
study of such activities, which, after Fine (1987, 2012), I refer to
as idiocultures, offers productive ways to think about the three
challenges to considering culture as a group of people engaged in a
shared activity.[2]
First, because the researchers provide the initial design of the
activity, which includes its placement in an already- established host
institution, the initial boundaries of the culture can be identified
with some certainty, and its fluid, porous borders, if such they be,
can be traced and the consequences of their changes studied.
Second, by designing and implementing such activities with the
specific aim of studying their growth and development along with that
of the children, youth, and young adults who constitute the group, one
has direct, access to the history of the group. Unlike the case of
national-level cultural analysis, where the ever changing and dynamic
of culture is typically shrouded the past, the study of designed
idiocultures allows one to be there "at the beginning" and to trace
the processes of change over periods for years, is appropriate. In the
present case, such processes have been studied over time spans ranging
up to decades. Cultural (historical) change, ontogenetic change, and
microgenesis (moment to moment change in interaction), three temporal
scales, can be studied at the same time.
Third, because the idioculture we created was intended to
benefit the large, heterogeneous, multi-ethnic category of children
who were struggling in school, within-culture variability was a basic
consideration in its design; as we later phrased it, the challenge was
to "design for diversity."
Simultaneously, our focus on "culture as people existing in the
same context" is combined with an intense interest in studying how the
acquisition of culturally valued ideas, beliefs, technologies, habits,
practices and a lot of learning from others can be more effectively
and inclusively organized. Hence, both the "knowledge acquisition" and
the"culture as group" ways of thinking about culture were present,
hopefully combined in an effective manner.
In the pages to follow, I will describe the conditions that gave
rise to the first prototype activity that was to develop into an
idioculture. I then describe a comparative study of this activity when
it was implemented in a variety of local community institutions in
several locations over several decades by overlapping teams of
researchers. I will conclude by highlighting findings that underpin my
claim for the theoretical, as well as the practical utility of this
culture-inclusive form of research.

From Computer Time to The Fifth Dimension
The activity that eventually led to the study of idiocultures
was one of four small group activities created as part of an
afterschool educational research project focused on the diagnosis and
remediation of children, identified by their teachers, who were
failing to learn to read. Of the 24 2nd-6th graders in the program, 13
fit the clinical definition of "learning disabled" as assessed by the
tests being used at the time (See LCHC, 1982, for details).
It began in 1981 as "computer time" with three Apple II
computers and a small set of programs, most of which had been produced
commercially to promote literacy, numeracy, and reasoning, a few of
which were designed by member of LCHC (Riel & Levin, 1985). Our plan
was to have 6 children working on the computers in pairs and to rotate
activities so that all children got significant computer time each
session.
This strategy started off promisingly. Personal computers were
still a novelty and we observed children whose motivation flagged in
our other activities working avidly and cooperatively on
intellectually challenging tasks. But very soon children began to
bring in that new invention, floppy discs, containing their favorite
arcades games -- the infamous Pacman, Brickout, and other shoot-em-up
games that are now experiencing a revival on smart phones.
Arcade games posed a real problem for us. Firstly, they were
more attractive, especially to the boys (who brought the games into
the after-school program). A few of the boys in particular
aggressively claimed time on the computers, undermining our concern
for equity of access to computer-based experience for the girls, and
creating a social friction. We began to find ourselves policing
children in a manner all to familiar in their classrooms and we were
failing to provide the children experiences that might, in fact, help
them in school. To top it off, it was embarrassing when their teacher
stopped by to observe (disapprovingly) what was transpiring.
Arcade games also provided promising opportunities. Children who
worked hard to avoid teaching/learning interactions in other settings
engaged the game tasks with great perseverence, attentiveness, and
showed a lot of progress from trial to trial and day to day. We were
especially impressed with the way that the children traded strategies
and learned from each other as they played. The challenge was,
somehow, to create an activity that retained as many as possible of
the positive characteristics of the arcade games as we could while
inserting more academic content into them -- while retaining the high
level of engagement of the children. Under intense pressure to convert
computer time into an activity that the children would be attracted
to, and that both we and their teachers could appreciate as a
contribution to their education, we created the Fifth Dimension
(hereafter, 5thD).
The 5thD was roughly modeled on the popular fantasy role playing
game, Dungeons and Dragons. During the first week when school was on
recess for a holiday, the 5th Dimension was conceived and prototype
materials gathered. When the children returned to class and the after-
school program, they were greeted by a rearranged area that included
several computers, a table for non-computer activities, and a maze
made of cardboard that contained 21 rooms. Every child was given a
"cruddy creature" as an avatar to mark their location in the maze. The
children were shown a short video in which a Wizard shrouded in fog
introduced the Constitution of the 5th Dimension to the children (an
audio tape from a Wizardess was found by one of the children the next
week, establishing the gender flexibility of this entity). From that
time forward, participation in computer and non-computer games that
were a part of the after-school activity was a means for achieving
increased levels of skill at activities associated with the rooms of
the maze. Children who became expert in at least half of the games
could become Wizard's assistants who helped to choose new games and to
design 'beginner, good, and excellent' levels of performance, which in
turn provided access to additional rooms and additional choices of
potentially attractive games.
A number of design features, many of them derived from the work
of Vygotsky and his followers, were built into the structure of the
5th D activities. These included:
The provision of a wide range of games and game-like tasks
in order to appeal to the broadest possible range of
motives for participation, inclusive of girls as well as
boys, older children as well as younger.
An orientation to computers and games that treated them as
a medium to enable joint mediated activity among the varied
participants
Specification of levels of achievement within the game that
ranged from elementary to quite complex in a manner that
insured some level of success for novices, and new
challenges as expertise increases.
Tasks cards for each game, as a tool to guide novice
players of all ages and for maximizing a balance of play,
learning, and peer interaction, depending upon the content
of the tasks involved.
Procedures for completing tasks placed heavy emphasis on
mediation in the organization of the entire system of
activities. A variety of media, including text-based
computer messaging, explaining or teaching through
conversation, and writing hints for a collective album of
tips for succeeding at the games, were put in the service
of achieving the goals that emerged for the children within
the activity. This strategy put into practice Vygotsky's
idea that "the thought is completed in the word."
Inclusion of undergraduates enrolled in a research class as
'older peers.' They participated with the children,
encouraging them to make wise choices in navigating the
maze and helped when a child was struggling. (The
undergraduates were encouraged to "help as little as you
can but enough so that both you and the child are having a
good time," an operationalization of the idea of a zone of
proximal development)
In so far as possible, children's participation was
arranged to make it voluntary. At a minimum, participation
was not a legal requirement, but it required the
accommodation of parents and guardians to the hours in
which the program ran and the willingness of the children
to participate. This feature of the activities both
minimized disruptive behavior and constantly forced the
designers to maximize the extent to which the activities
were genuinely motivating for the children.


As recounted in several publications (e.g., Griffin & Cole,
1984; LCHC,1982) this initial implementation appeared successful on
several grounds. The children were eager to participate, initially
skeptical teachers and parents thought the activities worthwhile, and
considerable progress was made in developing measures of performance
using the structure of the games and tasks cards to track the
children's progress over time.

From the 5thD as a Fantasy Game World to the 5thD as an idioculture.
During the period when the 5thD was part of an afterschool
program activities we did not appear to feel any need to treat what we
had created as a culture (LCHC, 1982). The 5thD was designated by such
labels as "fantasy world" or "game world." The words culture and
cultural appear in our early reports, but always as an abstract noun
(in phrases such as "culture and cognition") or in reference to the
presumed cultural identity of the children. We were focused on
literacy and numeracy development using alternative means of
instruction and for this purpose the central concepts of cultural-
historical psychology, terms such as "artifact mediation", "activity
system," "the general law of cultural development", "zone of proximal
development" and associated theoretical principles seemed sufficient.
It was only after we created a whole "make believe world,"
populated it with many game-like activities, gave it a distinctive set
of initial rules, roles, and responsibilities, and inserted it into
several different after-school institutions that the need for using
the term, "culture" began to force its way into our vocabulary.

Implementing a comparative study of the 5thD in different settings
It was several year before we were able to obtain research funds
and make the necessary preparations to undertake further study of the
5thD as medium of after-school education. The next step had to be a
large and time consuming undertaking: we needed to seek out several
plausible community institutions and interest them in the 5thD. If
they were interested, we had to actually implement the activity in
multiple locales. That meant running 3 or 4 local implementations of
the 5thD at the same time. In so far as modifications were made to
local 5thDs (we had only experienced the original), we had to run four
individually tailored, versions of our designed 5thD. And of course,
as expected when one considers the 5thD as our text, and the
institution in which it was located as its CON-text, this is exactly
what we anticipated, modifications were required at each site.
An additional set of concerns entered our design via the
experience of writing a collective monograph about educational
innovations that appeared to work successfully with marginalized
populations (Cole, Griffin, & LCHC, 1987). A cardinal conclusion we
drew from this experience was that successful programs involving women
and minorities in what are now referred to as the STEM field arise
from a failure of successful programs, which are experimental in
nature, to be sustained in the instituions that have hosted them. The
leading suspect: Once external funding for the special program was
removed, the local institution could not sustain it, regardless of its
proven success. The institution's priorities lay elsewhere. If this
was in fact true, then the research on success is irrelevant to the
value placed on the outcome.
To address this issue we came up with a design that, if
successful, would provide a way to sustain the activity. To this end,
a basic part of the design was the provision that agreeing to be a
host institution meant a commitment to continue the partnership after
the initial funding period if the local institution deemed it
successful. The goal was a 50-50 cost sharing arrangement: the
university would agree to continue to send supervised students through
its practicum courses and help with technological arrangements while
the community institution would provide staff support, space, and the
children. This arrangement appealed to several local community
organizations, but when it came to actually implementing a working
5thD, three institutions agreed to participate.
These three sites, each with their own version of a common set
of theoretical ideas and design choices became parts of three
integrated, distinctive, after school program in three different
community institutions. We viewed this arrangement as analogous to
three "tasks" in three "contexts." And in addition, the question of
sustainability was addressed. We fully expected, on the basis of the
literature on school reforms and the rapid turnover in and out of the
educational world of new silver bullets, that we would be present not
only at the birth of three 5thD's but at their deaths. In effect we
would be studying the lifespan of a promising educational innovation
along with the developmental change of the system, the children, and
the young adults who participated.

A brief history of the three sites
The three institutions that agreed to enter into collaboration
running the 5thD were a Childcare Center, the local Library, and a
Boys and Girls Club. In the fall of 1987 the 5thD opened
simultaneously in all three institutions.
At the Childcare center the introduction of computer games for
the 4-6 year olds who attended was met with enthusiasm, but the 5thD
as a fully implemented system struggled to get a foothold. A space was
made for 3 or 4 computers in an multi-activity room on 5thD days and
the children eagerly engaged with the undergraduates in playing the
games. But the activities only implemented parts of the full program,
and interactions remained at the level of "computer time." While we
were eager to make the program work as a whole, and it seemed that
progress was being made, the program came to a rapid halt for
institution reasons. The problem was not with the quality of the
program, but in the fact that in 1987 there was a national panic about
child abuse involving childcare centers. When the second quarter of
activity opened and the principal saw unfamiliar males walking into
the center, she became very concerned. We asked that we be allowed to
complete the quarter because UCSD had to be responsible to its
students and she agreed.
Even this abbreviated effort yielded several results. First of
all, it was not necessarily easy to get "elbow room" in a host
institution so that the 5thD can grow as whole. It can be, so to
speak, disassembled by local circumstances. Secondly, it was clear
that a "successful innovation" as evaluated by participant enthusiasm
and evidence of learning may fail even when they are fully funded
because of historical contingencies that disturb the institution in
which the activity occurs.
The two remaining 5thDs continued for three years during which
it was possible to carry out comparisons between the 5thD in the
library and the 5thD in the Boys and Girls Club. It was during this
extended period that we began to use the term, culture, to describe
the 5thD. At the same time, the 5thD existed in two distinct
institutions separated by a Freeway and a lot of traffic. The Club was
across the street from an elementary school which provided the
majority of its children. So children walked there. Walking to the
Library was difficult so instead of walking to the 5thD, children who
participated at the Library were driven there from school by their
parents who picked them up at the end of the day. We had the
conditions for a cross-cultural study of the 5thD as considered as two
idiocultures in two different context.


The emergence of the 5thD as a Cultural System
During the three year period when the Library and Club were both
in operation, the UCSD students who participated at the two sites all
attended the same practicum class on the UCSD campus which I taught
along with a junior colleague and two research assistants who also
participated in coordinating the activities. During class time, the
intellectual background of the 5thD and the procedures for
implementing it discussed. Thus there was, so to speak, a common germ
of a cultural system inherent in the 5thD as it had been previously
designed and implemented.
In our first attempt to theorize the 5thD as a distinctive
cultural system, we suggest that the 5thD be considered a cultural of
collaborative learning "built upon a normative system of shared and
voluntarily accepted rules that are embedded in, and constitutive of,
an ongoing practice." (Nicoloupolou & Cole, 1993, p. 292). Viewed in
this way, the different institutional contexts created varying
circumstances within which to grow such a culture.

Comparing the two systems
First I provide a narrative account of the character of each of
the systems to be compared, followed by some quantitative data linking
the children's learning to the character of their local culture of
collaboration.
A narrative description of the two systems. The 5thD in the
library was given a relatively small space in a back corner of a large
room that was otherwise laid out like a typical small suburban
library. The librarians were helpful in providing a telephone line so
that the participants could be in contact with the Wizard. We sought
to make information searching a significant theme in the 5thD by
having part of the children's activities with the games involve using
parts of the library. But playing the games in the 5thD was the big
attraction for the children. And playing games together with another
child and an undergraduate can get noisy, especially when the players
are closing in on Carmen San Diego and excitement mounts. So the
undergrads and the kids had to try and keep in mind that "Shhhh. This
is the library 5th Dimension. "
The 5thD in the Boys and Girls club found itself in completely
different circumstances. It was allotted its own room where the
computers could be arranged in any manner we chose. A large table in
the middle of the room held a temporary cardboard maze and provided
ample space for creating drawings and storing the various artifacts
needed to engage in the 5thD. It had no difficulty establishing itself
as a separate activity and it was popular among the children. However,
in a manner analogous to the situation at the Childcare center, it
proved difficult for the 5thD to establish itself.
In this case, a major factor slowing the emergence of a culture
of collaborative learning were the institutional norm of providing
children with a safe and healthy place to spend the after-school while
permitting unfettered coming and going as one chooses. These norms
meant that the children came and left of the 5thD of their own accord,
either to engage in some other activity in the Club or because a
parent has stopped by to take them home. The 5thD room was routinely
full of children, eager to participate, but the caste of players
changed considerably within and between sessions. As a consequence it
was difficult to create enough continuity of experience for the 5thD
to take hold as a collective activity.
These difficulties led to a number of attempts to modify the
original design of the 5thD in order to support its core cultural
values while satisfying the constraints imposed by the routines and
norms of the Club. During its first year, the activity underwent a
number of revisions making it difficult for the norms and values built
into the design of the 5thD to coalesce into a coherent structure.
Eventually satisfactory stability around the design conception of the
5th D emerged, and as it did so, the 5th D emerged as a distinct
culture of its own in its institutional setting.
An analytic account of the two systems.
With so many moving parts, documenting a 5thD is a difficult
undertaking. The methods that we used to track the development the
5thD activities included the following:
The methods we developed in order to be able to describe the
teaching/learning interactions included:
"Cognitive-ethnographic field notes" modeled on the work of
Hutchins (2003)
and Luria (1947/1970). These notes were written by undergrads and
staff following each session, detailing their interactions with people
at the site, the behavior of the children fulfilling different 5thD
tasks, and children's level of achievement day by day.
Extensive video-taping of full days and selected
activities. These data were used
to document processes of change at various levels of analysis in
sufficient detail to establish the properties of the activity system
"in vivo."
Collection of artifacts including interviews with students
and staff, and
community partners, correspondence via email with community partners,
end of quarter summaries written by each student, newspaper stories,
awards, and yearly reports to supporting institutions.
Various tests of children's learning modeled on the
activities they engaged in. As
a simple example, the task card for the excellent level on Carmen USA,
a game designed to teach American political geography, asked the child
to fill out a blank map of the US with the names of all the states.
(For extensive examples, see Cole & The Distributed Literacy
Consortium, 2006, chapter 5).
We conceived of these data as providing evidence at several
levels of context simultaneously. (See Figure 1)

Insert Figure 1 Here
Figure 1: Levels of context in which the 5thD was embedded and the
forms of data used for description and analysis associated with each
level.

This diagram, adopted from the work of Bronfenbrenner (1979) on the
social ecology of development applied equally to the library and the
Club. For comparative purposes, the level of the 5thD in the diagram
was comprised of many adult-computer-adult triad at the center of the
diagram, corresponding to the many games that each contained.
Three results of our analysis provided important lessons from
comparisons of the two 5thD's:
First, the fact that there were many games played frequently at
both sites made it possible to compare the amount of learning that
children achieved when playing the same game in the two different
settings. As an example we analyzed the relative success of children
at the two sites when they played Mystery House, a commercially
available game that follows the form of a murder mystery. Players
enter a house where people are dying and they are confronted with a
series of dangers and clues. The objective is to use the clues to find
the killer and obtain hidden jewels without getting killed oneself. To
make progress requires not only trial and errors, but a good deal of
and effort, and is aided by good teamwork. To advance in the game
requires that the children create knowledge, preserve knowledge
accumulated in prior sessions and, because new players appear
routinely, and playing was done in small teams, it requires sharing
information between players.
When performances on this game at the Library were compared with
those at the Club during the second year of the project, the former
showed a pattern of improvement and a level of overall performance
over the course of each quarter. The children at the Club displayed
sporadic bursts of good performance, but there was little or no
accumulation over the course of the year. From this perspective, we
argued that the differences in performance were attributable to the
presence of a denser culture of collaborative learning at the Library.
We attributed this difference to the different set of institutional
constraints under which each 5thD operated. At the library these
constraints supported more intimate relations between the undergrads
and the children, and the "serious" nature of the Library that
encouraged quiet information seeking. At the Club such constraints
were absent; in fact, the norms of the Club worked against the
formation of a common culture.
Second, as the sites continued to develop during the first year
of the experiment, all of the research staff and several of the
students had an opportunity to observe and participate in both of the
5thD's, each of which had an LCHC staff member as its coordinator.
Initially in conversation, and then more systematically, we began to
note how different the two 5thD's seemed. Everyone noted that the
library 5thD was much more orderly; the Club 5thD was, by comparison,
more raucous and loosely structured.
However, we also noted that the institutional contexts of the
two 5thD's differed in exactly the same way. Outside the room that
house the 5thD, younger children ran around and engaged in the
horseplay while teens presumably doing their homework listened to
popular music that could be distinctly heard through the open door of
the 5thD, as could the shouts of the children in large swimming pool
outside the windows of the 5thD room.
Figure 2 is a diagram comparing the noise levels of the two
5thD's in relationship to each other and their contexts at the same
time. We had no VU meter on the different sites, but the differences
were not subtle.
Insert Figure 2 Here
Figure 2 A comparison of two idiocultures with respect to the noise
level within the activity and the relative noise levels of their own
immediate surroundings.

It is clear that one's judgment about "the orderliness of the
5thD" depend very much upon their institutional contexts. While the
5thD at the Library is orderly compared to the 5thD in the Club, it is
noisier than its institutional context, while the reverse is true for
the Club 5thD.
Both of these differences were consequential in determining the
fate of the two 5thD's. Here we arrive at the issue of sustainability.

Third, as noted by O'Neil (2007, p.7) educational innovations
are like fireflies - "they shine brightly for a few moments, and then
disappear again" (O'Neil, 2007, p. 7). We saw this happen at the
Childcare Center as a result of incompatibility between the activity
and its institutional context.
During the third year of collaborative work, a new Librarian was
appointed. Despite the fact that money was available from her Friends
of the Library group to support the activity, she felt that the
activity was not sufficiently in the scope of the Library's mission.
By contrast, the Club staff took up our offer to continue the
5thD there. They liked the fact that their children now had something
they saw as clearly educational to their programming; they like the
access to computers and to the undergraduates. They agreed to start
paying for a part time coordinator from their own staff to work with
LCHC to continue the development of the activities. It was not until
15 years later, owing to gentrification of the community and a shift
in the Club's priorities to service their constituency, that the 5thD
ended when the Club decided to close for two years to remodel and
reorganize their programming.
Space does not permit a proper treatment of the lessons to be
learned from following the long term development of the Club 5thD[3].
For present purposes, I will focus on the issue of tracing cultural
boundaries.
Over the years we were able to trace the boundaries of the 5thD
in interesting and informative ways. Over time, with increased
pressure on after-school institutions such as the Club to provide more
educational programming, led to an expansion of the 5thD from its
initial borders inside a specially set-aside room to become elements
in many of the Club's different activity rooms. By adding new
activities into the maze, the 5thD became an element in children's
engagement in many parts of the Club. New task cards challenged kids
to shoot baskets, but in a way that involved record keeping and
comparison. The arts and crafts activities were easily incorporated
into the 5thD's ways of infusing more fun into routine tasks and more
education into the children's other activities. When the Club closed,
approximately 40% of the children attending every day were involved in
the 5th D and 5thD-style activities permeated the Club.
The emphasis on the Club's When it reorganized, the Club based
its programming primarily on swimming and basketball, with little,
organized, activity that could be construed as academic. The parents
who could pay the fees for the program could also pay for computers
and tutors for their children. The educational emphasis had
disappeared. The 5thD had outlived its usefulness at the Club. It was
no longer supported by its institutional context.
In the remaining page I can only note some of the interesting
phenomena linking culture and development through research that began
with that pro-5thD in a school-based after-school club and is
continuing in dozens of locations in the US and several other
countries (see uclinks.berkeley.edu for the current state of this
project and associated references).

Beyond Two Case Comparisons
The difficulty of using two-culture comparisons to draw
inferences about psychological changes are well known, and methods for
dealing with it are on display in the other papers in this symposium.
The problems, of course, could be leveled at our comparison of the
Mystery House Learning in the two settings? Maybe the children were
selected in some unseen way. We argued that his ways not the case
(Nicolopolou & Cole, 1993) but logically, we could not exclude the
possibility that the children were from different sub-cultures within
the Community.
The solution is to collect more cases. Fortunately, we were able
to do that. The combination of public clamor for their children to
become computer savvy, the need of families to find after-school care
for their children, pressure on schools and other community
institutions to provide more school-relevant activities, all
contributed to the spread of the 5thD. As a consequence, over the next
two decades, several dozen research groups put together their own
attempts to adopt & adapt the 5thD. In each case, a distinctive
idioculture that is recognizable as a "culture of collaborative
learning" arises, but each organized in terms of a distinct set of
relationships between that idioculture and its institutional setting.
In each case, evidence from within the 5thD indicates that it induces
children's development through some mixture of play and academic
learning.
However, demonstrating efficacy in academic terms is
insufficient to grant a 5thD long life if it does not become well
integrated with its institutional context. And that context extends
beyond the level of the cooperating institution to include the context
of the community and beyond. In rural North Carolina a YMCA may not
approve of boys and girls playing together, children talking back to
college students, or children helping each other with matters
academic. Its called cheating. In Oceanside it might be that the
school system changes its schedule to make impossible coordination
with college instructors and students. In Whittier the long duration
of the activity at the local Boys and Girls Club resulted in graduates
of the program coming into positions of power in the organization.
When combined with the endurance of the researcher working with his
college and local philanthropists, the 5th has become
institutionalized by all the essential partners. My colleagues and I
are currently engaged in analyzing the data from all sites that took
the 5thD, more or less as it existed at the Club, as a model for their
own efforts to trace all of the ways in which the contextual factors
involved in sustaining a 5thD are interwoven to provide necessary
sustaining context of this tiny form of social life.

What about the next generation?
Pursuing the strategy of planting 5thDs in a great variety of
settings, involving different kinds of institutional settings allows
one, if lucky, to witness "next generation" versions of the 5thD.
Owing to a variety of factors (Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium,
2006) the statewide system of the University of California adopted the
5thD as a tool deal with the banning of affirmative action in
admissions to the University. The program is called UC-Links promoting
UC's interest in diversity but also to signify its structural basis in
University-Community Links. With this kind of expansion, the next
generation of 5thD's had to break the design boundaries with which we
began. Various UC links focused on children and youth from pre-k
through high school. Dungeons and Dragons was no longer a useful
metaphor. Nor was the restriction of the activities to desktop
computers and modems. The digital revolution was upon us, a mega socio-
cultural change that is disequilibriating everyday life.

An Idiocultural Competence and Pesonality Formation
Observations within the 5thD over a long period of time allow
one, with a strong method of documentation, to trace the relation
between individual differences and the acquisition of cultural
knowledge in a way that captures some of the dynamics of the process.
An example is the case of Chet, a 7 year old child, clinically
diagnosed as mildly retarded, who attended the 5thD until he was 13
when he moved away (Cole & Packer, Uruguay). When the undergrads first
met Chet (we did not single him out or label him) they noticed that he
was very friendly, but seemed to have an unusually difficult time with
a lot of the games. He gave up easily even with a friendly undergrad
playing along with him. The undergrads referred to him in their field
notes as learning disabled. I noted that he came from difficult family
circumstances and that boys sometimes have difficulty dealing with
school.
Chet was a devotee of the 5thD, producing a large electronic
corpus of fieldnotes of undergraduates from many generations of
participants in the 5thD (which obtained new students every quarter).
What is unmistakable in those notes is a change in Chet's personality
and competence over a period of several years. It was still the early
days of desktop computers and the undergraduates were not familiar
with the Macintosh that connected the 5thD to the Wizard. And the
Wizard was one of Chet's favorite people.
He and the Wiz were buddies and when it came to writing to the Wiz,
Chet did a lot of learning, although an undergrad was there to share
the work of typing and reading. Chet also had become familiar with at
least the beginning levels of all the games in the 5thD about which
the undergrads generally knew little if anything. Under these
conditions, the fieldnotes show Chet become a polite young man, eager
to help, who was something of a computer expert.
Chet's problems outside the 5thD, however, did not go away.
Especially as he grew older, he suffered more and more social
rejection. One day he entered the 5thD in an angry mood. He sat down
at the Computer and demanded contact with the Wiz. When the Wiz was
contact, Chet began berating his friend, calling him names. The Wiz,
astonished, refused it was Chet and wrote that someone was pretending
to be Chet and would the real Chet please come back. Chet, seeing the
Wizard's message, typed his name CHET and said he had commandeered the
computer from Chet. At the Wizard's suggestion CHET agreed to
relinquish the computer to Chet, and the conversation resumed. Chet,
it seems, had formed an idioculture-specific personality.[4]

Concluding Remarks
I conclude by returning to my claim that the study of
idiocultures offers productive ways to think about culture both as
knowledge, skills, etc., and as a group of people engaged in a shared
activity. With respect to the first perspective, we have seen that
different idiocultures promote different amounts of learning depending
upon the way they are shaped by their institutional contexts. With
respect to culture as joint activity in shared contexts we have seen
that it is possible to trace the development of an idioculture from
the conditions out of which it arises in a manner that enables to meet
the challenge of tracing its borders over time as a part of the
process of understanding its dynamics, which differ from site to site.
This same set of conditions allows us to trace change in terms of
three levels of context and three different times scales: Cultural
(historical) change, ontogenetic change, and the moment to moment
changes in interaction that constitute the embodiment of culture in
the behavior of its members. Finally, because the idioculture in
question is devoted to the study of children struggling in school and
this population is manifestly heterogeneous, within-culture
variability is a taken for granted norm.
Properly carried out, such research is a multi-disciplinary
undertaking that requires time, patience, and resources. Even
partially carried out, as in our case, such research can yield
insights relevant to theory and practice that only a culture-inclusive
psychology can yield.

REFERENCES

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development.
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Cole, M. (2016). Designing for development: Across the scales of
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Russell Sage.
Cole, M., Griffin, P. & LCHC (1987). Contextual factors in
education: Improving science and mathematics education for minorities
and women. Madison, WI. Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
Cole, M., Kobelt, E., & Packer, M. (2014). La metodología de la
investigación para una psicología concreta: La investigación con la
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Fine, G.A. (1987). With the Boy:Little league baseball and
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Fine, G.A. (2012). Tiny publics. New York: Russell Sage.
Griffin, P. & Cole, M. (1984) New technologies, basic skills,
and the underside of education. What's to be done? In, J. Langer
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Heine, S. (2008). Cultural psychology. New York: Norton, 2008.
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LCHC (1982). A model system for the study of learning difficulties.
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[1] For those interested, many accounts of this research are available as
pdf files at lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
[2] Fine (1987) remarks that "Culture includes the meaningful traditions
and artifacts of a group; ideas, behaviors, verbalization, and material
objects." (p. 124). He defined an idioculture as 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).
[3] For an account of this extended case study, see Cole (2016)
[4] For details, see Cole, Kobelt, & Packer (2014)