The Fifth Dimension: The Power of Artifacts in Agency and Learning
The innovative multi-mediated activity known as Fifth Dimension or 5D (Cole, 1996; Nilsson & Nocon, 2005) was promoted within a collaborative project between an Italian university and a local elementary school starting in the fall of 2004. The 5D was used as an interventionist methodology of teacher education for pre-service and in-service teachers at the school. The project was designed in response to demands from the Italian Ministry of Education to introduce informatics in elementary schooling and from the future elementary school teachers, who preferred to spend their internship time at the school more actively than sitting in classrooms observing.
Three teachers in the school and an internship supervisor agreed to participate in the project as members of the research group. The research group also included three Master’s degree students writing theses on the 5D and a volunteer informatics expert. After an eight-month period of joint conceptualization and planning, the 5D operated from March through May 2005 in the multimedia laboratory of the school in weekly, 3-hour sessions. 13 third-year university students were involved in the project as part of their internship. One or two first- and fourth-grade pupils were assigned to each student who assisted them in accomplishing learning tasks during weekly sessions of three hours using multiple artifacts. Some of those were already available in the site to the participants, others we built by the participants themselves. Altogether 13 first-graders and 19 fourth-graders participated.
Recent related references
Sannino, A. (2008). Sustaining a non-dominant activity in school: Only a utopia? Journal of Educational Change, 9(4), 329-338.
Sannino, A. (2010). Breaking out of a professional abstraction: The pupil as materialized object for trainee teachers. In V. Ellis, A. Edwards & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Cultural-historical perspectives on teacher education and development: Learning teaching (pp. 146-159). London: Routlege.