ABSTRACT
The traditions of governance since the Second World War of professional control and then market competition, have been unable to respond to the concerns of citizens experiencing misrecognition and lacking a voice in the concerns confronting their lives. Citizens acquire status and rights as members of the polity, but their principal obligations are actively to participate and contribute to the life and deliberations of the dilemmas facing the public sphere. Communication creates a triangle of relationships connecting a speaker, listener and the world and what the speaker has to say will be judged by criteria appropriate to each domain. There are a number of writers who argue that a distinctive quality attaches to the creation of a public space for participants to deliberate their common concerns. Learning grows out of being motivated, having a sense of purpose, being engaged in something which one wants to know more about, be better at.
