Becoming a Classroom Community: A Reflexive Qualitative Analysis of Year-4 children’s Lifeworlds of Teamwork in a Melbourne Primary School

Abstract

This article explores how children’s everyday lifeworlds shape participation in classroom communities and the development of scholarly habitus. Drawing on a qualitative study in one Melbourne primary school, fifty Year 4 children (aged 9–10) completed ‘learning dialogues’ across a school week, producing written and drawn reflections on what they looked forward to, how they felt about school, and why these experiences mattered. Reflexive thematic analysis, informed by sociocultural concepts of lifeworlds and habitus, identified two themes: Teamwork (coordination, role-taking, planning talk) and Becoming a community (belonging, transition, and relational warmth). Children consistently linked e..