BEYOND GALILEOS TELESCOPE - SITUATED KNOWLEDGE AND THE ASSESSMENT OF EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

For all their celebration of experiential learning, current approaches to the assessment of prior experiential learning (APEL) are consisten t with and, in some respects, trapped within Enlightenment theories of knowledge. Alternative epistemologies offered by post-modernist, femi nist, and anti-racist theory suggest a different conceptual underpinni ng 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 academ ic authority.