Re-Theorising the Recognition of Prior Learning

The recognition of prior learning is an educational response to the need to widen participation in education and training for economic advancement and social inclusion.

The social meanings of RPL have different configurations depending on historical, cultural, economic and political forces in different places.

One constant is the reliance on the widely pervasive educational philosophies of experiential learning: constructivism and progressivism.

This book challenges the orthodoxy of experiential learning and the particular readings of knowledge, pedagogy, learning, identity and power which it privileges.

It does this by introducing different theoretical resources to RPL and drawing on experiences of RPL in the UK, South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Canada and the USA.

The book provides a range of re-conceptualisations of the relational terrain between adult experience and learning on the one hand, and specialist or academic knowledge on the other.