Sociocultural learning approaches : exploring early childhood communities of practice

When embedded into an early childhood teacher education program, a sociocultural framework offers a valuable structural resource for teacher educators working through the complexities associated with education in the 21st century. The primary intention of this article is to share the scholarship that underpinned the work of one group of early childhood tertiary educators who redesigned their degree programs within an explicit and clearly articulated sociocultural framework. The authors outline their understanding of communities of practice as an example of a sociocultural resource, and describe their use in the redesign of the professional experience component of a new program. They propose that a socioculturally informed approach to professional experience has the potential to reinvigorate partnerships and redistribute power among tertiary educators and with inservice and preservice teachers. Their conclusions, following an intensive period of research, course review and redesign are that socioculturally based, early childhood teacher education programs that employ communities of practice have great potential to enrich the educational lives of preservice and inservice teachers, tertiary educators and the children and families in their communities.