From “Rolling Mass Action” to “RPL”: the changing discourse of experience and learning in the South African labour movement

Abstract

This paper focuses on changing approaches to worker education within the South African labour movement over the past 20 years. It identifies the distinctive features of this movement in its early years of development, and shows how these were linked to an emancipatory educational discourse with particular notions of how knowledge is constructed, the role of experience in learning and the construction of particular forms of worker identity. It then traces the role of the labour movement in the development of new education and training policies in the context of transition to democracy in the 1990s. It shows how newer training discourses have impacted on union education and shifted the labour movements’ understandings of how and where knowledge is produced, the kinds of knowledge that should be valued, the social purpose of education and the very meaning of worker experience and its significance for learning.