RPL in Australian vocational education and training: what do we know (about it)?

This paper is the first stage of a proposed research study that will look back over 18 years of recognition of prior learning (RPL) in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector. The study aims to address a gap in the current VET research literature: that is an accounting for RPL as practice and as a device implicated in the political relations of Australian VET. In setting the scene for the larger study, this paper locates RPL in Australian VET in an historical context, and briefly explores its characteristics as a device for managing training outcomes: asking how we have come to understand and negotiate RPL as practice, and how our commonsense understandings have been theorised by Australian VET researchers. I start with an account, based on primary sources, of the first excursion into recognition assessment in Victoria in 1989, tracing the newly named RPL as it moves from this locale into the national VET policy arena. The second part of the paper addresses the various ways that RPL in Australian VET translates the workplace and the community into the academy, and recodes work and life experience as school knowledge. In concluding I propose that throughout its brief history in Australian VET RPL has been more productive in the political arena than it has as educational practice; and that its robust vigour as policy in the face of administrative and pedagogical obstacles is primarily owed to its rhetorical power to smooth over policy perplexities in a national VET system at odds with itself. I also point to the need for a new research focus if we are to work out how to achieve an equally robust vigour in educational practice.