ABSTRACT

This part has been concerned to explain ‘participation’ and critique current understandings of ‘non-participation’ to point to more innovative practices in lifelong learning. The chapters challenge current complacencies that suggest that diversity or structural inequalities no longer matter, and that non-participation is based in individual deficit and lack. The authors of these chapters have shown the resistances to being classified as non-participatory that come from learners and from teachers. They have also challenged current policy definitions of nonparticipation. The chapter authors demonstrate how people participate in both informal and formal learning in myriad ways and, as Hillier (Chapter 8) argues in her conclusion, there is much practice in lifelong learning that has told, and continues to tell, stories of innovative creativity.