Abstract: At the beginning of our project our intention was to analyze motivation as it presented in students at VUC through observations in the classroom and through interviews and focus groups. As we progressed with our data collection we discovered that the aspects that influenced their motivation for the education was a smaller part of the collective educational gain. We began to explore the context through the theory of Etienne Wenger called Communities of Practice and initially discovered that all students of VUC in some way or form belonged to the institutionally based community of practice. It became clear to us that the role of the community of practice to which the students belong played an intricate part of the overall amount of energy they put into their course work. So, with a focus on the students’ actions in their external environment, it became important for us to examine the internal processes as well, and how these impacted the way the students acted. Knud Illeris works with his theory on learning by examining three correlating processes involved in all learning: the content of what is being learnt, the energy necessary to ensure the psychological forces needed to transfer meaning onto said content, and the correlation between individual and the context in which they learn. By utilizing Knud Illeris’ theory on learning we examined this correlation between content, how the contents affected the drive within the students to learn, and how those two processes impacted the way they engaged with their environment. Illeris’ theory focuses on analyzing the internal processes where Etienne Wenger, with his theory of Communities of Practice, widens the scope to examine how individuals act with their surroundings, and how their actions and the resulting reactions from these surroundings impact their self-perception. In accordance with Wenger’s Communities of Practice we examined the students of VUC from the basis of their shared knowledge negotiation, how their statements from our interviews corresponded to our observations of their praxis, how their actions and knowledge negotiation helped to build a community, and lastly how this community impacted their self-perception. The results show that early goal-setting helps the students to focus their knowledge negotiation and that interaction with smaller groups within the larger community of practice, which the VUC is, helps shape their subsequent interactions to guide them towards a more defined set of norms and implicit rules within the community of practice.