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The recognition of prior learning (RPL) 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. The contents are: Introduction and overview of chapters / Judy Harris; Different faces and functions of RPL: an assessment perspective / Per Andersson; Questions of knowledge and curriculum in the recognition of prior learning / Judy Harris; A disciplinary-specific approach to the recognition of prior informal experience in adult pedagogy: 'rpl as opposed to 'RPL' / Mignonne Breier; Portfolio-based assessment of prior learning: a cat and mouse chase after invisible criteria / Yael Shalem and Carola Steinberg; RPL and the disengaged learner: the need for new starting points / Roslyn Cameron; Beyond Galileo's telescope: situated knowledge and the recognition of prior learning / Elana Michelson; Using critical discourse analysis to illuminate power and knowledge in RPL / Helen Peters; The politics of difference: non-recognition of the foreign credentials and prior work experience of immigrant professionals in Canada and Sweden / Shibao Guo and Per Andersson; RPL: an emerging and contested practice in South Africa / Ruksana Osman; 'Tools of mediation': an historical-cultural approach to RPL / Linda Cooper; Vocations, 'graduateness' and the recognition of prior learning / Leesa Wheelahan; Recognising prior learning: what do we know? / Helen Pokorny; Reconfiguring RPL and its assumptions: a complexified view / Tara Fenwick; Understanding the transformative dimension of RPL / Susan Whittaker, Ruth Whittaker and Paula Cleary; Endword / Michael Young.