One student, Maritza, expressed dissatisfaction with her learning in the classroom because she felt she wasn't being challenged enough and wanted to transfer to the higher level group. She never approached her instructor about her concerns. When I suggested that she could talk to her instructor about her frustrations, she was silent, and did not want to discuss the idea further. She may have thought I would interpret her frustrations as a complaint against her instructor.

Tom and Martha were the only students who thought that the learning that occurred in the classroom was far less important than the learning that occurred in their job placements. Both wanted to see themselves as employees and were no longer as interested in being students. While they said they enjoyed being students and recognized that they were able to learn new skills in the classroom, such as handling money, they seemed to place a greater value on their job placements and their desire to be working.

The classroom context, like its content, emphasized a traditional skills approach to literacy development. The space looked like any classroom found in an elementary school, and may have looked worse than many rooms because it used castoff furnishings and relied on temporary spaces. In relation to the non-physical learning context, students placed a tremendous value on the development of literacy skills compared to the development of literacy tasks, practices, and critical reflection. Some of these values may have been brought into the class, based on the students' past experiences, but they were then engrained as the norm by the physical setting, the skills–based materials and knowledge, and the teaching approach of the instructors, which will be examined next.

Community of Practice

Overall, the activities that were done in the classroom were fueled by a teaching approach rather than a learning approach, one of the key elements that defines a community of practice. In addition, students and instructors did not share the same ideas about what the learning purpose was. Instructors saw the classroom as preparation for the activities that occurred in the coffee shop, but students did not see this connection.