In stark contrast, the classroom focus was on teaching literacy skills and tasks rather than learning literacy as it would be used outside the classroom. This focus meant that students were engaged in activities about literacy that were intended to give them a basis of skills from which to draw upon in their daily lives. They were rarely engaged in literacy activities they actually used in their day–to–day lives. In other words, they were taught about spelling and writing paragraphs even if they had no purpose for this knowledge once they left the classroom. Activities, guided by a description of cumulative literacy skills, were done most often for the purpose of achieving progress markers and not for the purpose of performing an activity in daily life. The purpose of the classroom activities was linked more to the notion of literacy skill development than to its actual use. Most classroom activities were developed for use within the class and school setting and not for any setting outside of that. In addition, the opportunity for improvised practice rarely surfaced, although this may have been the intention of the classroom setting, as in the example of the fractions lesson. The classroom was intended to support learning in the coffee shop by allowing students the time, repetition, and support they needed to master an activity. But in the case of the fractions exercise, this link was immediately broken when the fractions lesson was separated from the activity for which it was intended to support. Not only was the learning about fractions separate from its purpose, tools, and setting, but the format of the lesson added additional layers of understanding, knowledge, and interpretation that needed to be mastered in order to complete the activity.

A job placement experience had a structure that could be described as a community of practice, but whether or not a community of practice emerged, in which members of that community could fully participate, was out of the control of the employment preparation program. Each placement site—the grocery store, cafeteria, childcare, discount department store, and coffee shop—was focused on learning rather than teaching, presented the students with an immediate understanding of the job they would perform, had opportunities for improvised practice in that job, and allowed the students to learn to do practice and not to simply learn about practice. But in order for all of these elements to be realized, the student needed to be given the opportunity to fully participate, and this was dependent on the supervisors at each site and their interpretation of their role with the students.

Despite the lack of a community of practice in the classroom, there were hints that it could in fact become a community of practice. For example, the only aspect of the classroom that students thought was linked to the rest of the program was the time spent on employability. In addition, students themselves began to use the classroom setting in a different way. It became the setting in which they shared their job placement experiences. A question that arises is how can the classroom better connect to the other two settings? Could the people and activities become a community of practice, and if they could, what would become the learning focus?