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In this article, the author proposes bases for a workplace pedagogy. Workplaces afford opportunities for vocational learning through engagement in everyday work tasks, direct guidance, e.g. interactions with work colleagues, and indirect guidance, e.g. observing and listening in the workplace. However, the quality of learning through these activities ultimately relies on the workplace's participatory practices. These practices determine the shape and distribution of the activities and support the workplace affordances available to workers from which they learn. These workplace affordances are underpinned by situational and political processes. Participatory practices are reciprocally constructed because individuals make their own decisions about how to engage in and learn from what workplaces afford them. The author proposes that a workplace pedagogy is instituted in these coparticipatory practices and needs to consider how workplaces encourage access to activities and guidance and how the workers themselves choose to participate in what the workplace affords them.