This research looks at student experiences of learning in a clinical teaching situation. At the end of a course, students took part in a class that was led by a user of the health system, rather than their usual lecturer. We chose to study this class because we knew that it provided a very different learning experience for the students and therefore gave us an opportunity to contrast this with their normal science teaching experiences. The study highlighted how embedded learning and teaching had become in a science curriculum that supported the transmission of authorized factual knowledge. It was shown that students could recognize alternative forms of knowledge and that these were valued in different ways. Furthermore, they acknowledged that they could learn in new ways although both these ideas were poorly understood. The study allowed us to reflect on our own learning and expose an important paradox in the choices we made in course design.