Reflective Essays on Community of Learners in Early Childhood Education

Course Code and Course Name Student ID and Student Name
Reflective Essay
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Name of University
Author’s note

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Reflective Piece: 1
A dialogue is defined as a two-way exchange of knowledge and subsequent sharing of
opinions and experiences. The effectiveness of exchange of information via the use of dialogues
cannot be overlooked under any professional circumstances especially global changes that have
occurred during this past decade. One of the global change include increase in the number of the
culturally and linguistically diverse students in teaching programs in countries like New Zealand,
Australia, United Kingdom and United States (Fleer, 2003). Form my personal experience of
working collaboratively from a community of learning perspective I want to highlight my initial
journey from being an outsider of the community in the professional of primary school teacher. I
am taking reflective approach to narrative my experience because, according to Broadley and
Fagan (2010), reflecting on practice is regarded as an integral part of being an early childhood
teacher.
I first started working as a primary teacher in the school. I am form the culturally and the
linguistically diverse community. Though English was my second langue and I am mainly well-
versed in Urdu. This language gap and my different culture made me the victim of
marginalization. Due to this marginalization, during my initial days, I used to experience
communication gaps. This gap in communication widen further as I started having an negative
feeling that my English was not as good as their English and stumbled on basic communication
and used to become self-conscious while approaching to communicate with my peers. I struggled
to approach to my colleagues for discussing various aspects of our professional performance at
school. This gap in the communication prevented the flow of the dialogues and this restricted the
two-way exchange of the information and thereby limiting my knowledge. According to Iyer and

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Reese (2013) this gap in the effective communication is the main reason why the pre-service
teachers who are from CALD backgrounds experience the sense of underachievement and this
in turn progress towards the loss of identity and decrease in the level of self-esteem. My personal
experience was no different. I was suffered from depression and poor self-esteem and loss hope
in the future progress of pre-service teacher. I was a peripheral observer initially and lack of
welcoming approach from my seniors prevented me from taking active steps to integrate more
deeply into the community of practice and thus I was gradually becoming marginalised. In
relation to this, Lave and Wenger's theory of Communities of Practice highlighted that Socratic-
type dialogue can be employed in order to critically ascertain and simultaneous reflect upon
some of the principal concepts of situated learning and their application in real-life. This concept
challenges the implied assumptions of legitimate peripheral participants. According to this
concept, legitimate peripheral participants provide minimal learning for an established
community of practice and that the learning is occurring in unidirectional form. However,
effective learning is bi-direction. So in order to promote bi-directional learning, the new-comers
must come forward from the wider community and provide valuable inputs of knowledge and
learning which will benefit the communities of practice they join (Weston, 2009).
Thus, in order to move from peripheral to the central participation I started
comprehending learning to the social world. This promoted the concept of the bi-directional
learning. In order to over-come the challenges as a new comer, I gradually started working on
my sense of social anxiety and poor self-esteem and tried to increase my interaction with my
peers, and my supervisors. While interacting with my collaborators I realised that they are
always ready to help you but the only thing is you are require to take the first step ahead. Their
collaboration and equity helped to slowly indulge into a friendly relationship with them, this

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increase my level of comfort and decrease in the level of anxiety along with increase the flow of
the information. According to Weston (2009), quality of legitimate participation evokes a sense
of belonging and this type of legitimacy of participation is important for effective learning.
Weston (2009) further opined that in order to affiliate one’s self within a new community and to
take effective participation as an active member, it is the duty of the new-comer to work in
accordance to and in defiance of traditions, which organise every community of practice. My
initial interaction was followed by regular interaction with my seniors, peers and my supervisors.
In the professional community for ECE teaching in NZ, my seniors took active initiatives to
include someone novice like me into interactive approach while addressing the complexity and
uncertainty under the real life contexts. This engagement as a joint enterprise was extremely
crucial for me as it helped me participate and practice. I gradually started experiencing the flow
of the knowledge and experienced diversity and difference as a constructive to learn in a more
culturally diverse situation. My collaboration with my seniors paved the way towards innovative
ideas leading to a refined pedagogical approaches which otherwise would have never been taken
place. My active approach in interacting with my fellow colleagues also increased their sense of
cultural competence and this further decreased the marginalization. We worked together towards
framing new educational plans and new ventures for the students to increase their overall
learning experience. We mainly stressed over the activity based learning where prime
importance is given towards effective interaction.
While summing up reflection, I want to highlight that in order to move ahead of the
restrictive and narrow boundaries of race and ethnicity, it is important to take into account the
type of effective communities of practice. Under this effective community of practice, it is the
duty of the new-comer to re-construct and renegotiate his or her social and cultural identities