Like many of my colleagues in rhetoric and technical communication, I believe in situating learning within contexts where writing has a distinct purpose and audience. Whatever level of course I’m teaching, I believe attending to the rhetorical situation—audience, purpose, context—is vital if students are to develop the knowledge and skills necessary for succeeding in what is increasingly termed the “new work order.” In this new work order, workers must demonstrate a willingness to be life-long learners, ready to pack up their portfolio of competencies and move on to sometimes unfamiliar contexts. Learning to analyze the rhetorical situation contributes to students’ development as professionals by helping them focus attention on what is valued in a situation and contribute meaningfully.

The goals and objectives in my classrooms are contextualized within what I call a communities of practice pedagogy. Described by Etienne Wenger as a theory of learning, communities of practice involve groups of people informally bound by a joint enterprise that is mutually negotiated in practice. Members learn to construct and negotiate meaning in conjunction with existing knowledge and skills in ways that add value to the enterprise. This accumulation of knowledge—which often takes the form of narratives—provides both a description of a practice and an assessment of that practice. Newcomers learn to interpret these narratives about practice as guidelines for performance.

In my classrooms, I use literature or client-based projects to provide a narrative context for learning. In actual communities of practice, this narrative context parallels the body of knowledge and the repertoire of practices to which members contribute. Students enter the narrative imaginatively, much as newcomers to a community imagine practice through narratives told by experienced members, and thereby function as members of a community of practice as they negotiate the assignment. This negotiation replicates the collaborative practice students will experience in the workplace—namely, mutual recognition of practice and the construction of meaning.

As part of the negotiation process, I involve students in the development of criteria appropriate for evaluating their performance in communities of practice. Generally, I provide students with broad outlines for performance that they then negotiate in collaboration with other students. These criteria include understanding how to belong to and participate in a community of practice, reifying the rules for negotiating meaning, interpreting meaning, identifying stakeholders, and reflecting on what it means to be a responsible member of that community.

By defining the boundaries of their performance and by evaluating theirs and others’ performance, students take responsibility for their learning, creating experiences that demonstrate active participation in knowledge making. Within this approach, I hope to continue developing creative relationships with students in ways continue the community of practice beyond the classroom in ways that will enrich my teaching experience, allowing me to not only practice what I preach but also to demonstrate active participation in the learning and teaching process. Because the numerical end-of-the-semester evaluations can tell a teacher only so much, I also rely on students’ verbal and written evaluative comments about the course, solicited with each assignment as well as their final reflection. This reflection is particularly telling of students’ perception of their own learning because how they construct the reflection and the meanings they express represent their abilities to add value to the enterprise—in this case, their education