Beyond Galileo's Telescope: Situated Knowledge and the Assessment of Experiential Learning

Abstract

For all their celebration of experiential learning, current approaches to the assessment of prior experiential learning (APEL) are consistent with and, in some respects, trapped within Enlight-enment theories of knowledge. Alternative epistemologies offered by post-modernist, feminist, and anti-racist theory suggest a different conceptual underpinning for APEL. Reinscribed within an epistemology of situated knowledge, APEL can grant visibility to outsider knowledge that is valuable for its divergence from academic ways of knowing, not only its similarity, and rewrite the relationship between experiential learning and academic authority.