RPL as Specialised Pedagogy

Please login to access download links.

Crossing the lines Internationally, Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) has become a standard component of education policy reforms aimed at meeting the requirements of a globalised labour market on the one hand and responding to demands for widening access to further and higher education on the other. However, despite RPL's promises to enable 'optimal inclusion', this ideal is not easily realised in practice. Drawing on case study research of RPL practices in four different contexts in South Africa, RPL as Specialised Pedagogy: Crossing the Lines offers a novel theoretical framework for understanding RPL as an assessment practice and as a specialised pedagogy for navigating knowledge boundaries across different contexts. The book develops a conceptual language for describing what is common and distinctive about RPL practices across different sites and contexts, thus providing a unique contribution to a traditionally under-theorised field. RPL as Specialised Pedagogy will be of significant interest to RPL practitioners and educators, researchers and students in the field, and policy researchers and policymakers.

Chapter 1: Overview

Alan Ralphs

Chapter 2: Conceptual starting points

Linda Cooper and Alan Ralphs

Chapter 3: RPL into postgraduate study: The tension between knowledge specialisation and social inclusion

Linda Cooper, Judy Harris and Barbara Jones

Chapter 4: Navigation tools: RPL for access to undergraduate study

Alan Ralphs

Chapter 5: The recruitment of experience in an alternative/radical RPL pedagogy

Kessie Moodley, Mphutlane Bofelo and Anitha Shah

Chapter 6: RPL and occupational competence

Karen Deller

Chapter 7: RPL as specialised pedagogy: Towards a conceptual framework

Linda Cooper and Alan Ralphs

Chapter 8: Configurations of more optimally inclusive RPL policy and practice

Linda Cooper and Alan Ralphs

Linda Cooper is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where she teaches on the Adult Education programme. She has acted as an education advisor to the trade union movement, and is a member of International Advisory Board of Researching Work and Learning Conference. Her research and publications have centred around the Recognition of Prior Learning, widening access to adult learners in higher education, workers’ education as a form of radical pedagogy, and the nature of, and relationship between, different forms of knowledge.

Alan Ralphs is an education specialist and researcher at the University of the Western Cape with a focus on the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). He currently runs the Portfolio Development Course at UWC and has been involved in RPL-related research since 2006. He has authored a number of publications related to this work and was a member of the National Advisory Committee that worked with SAQA in putting its most recent RPL policy (2013) together.