The third section discusses these themes with a view to exploring the responsibility of adult education
confronting these messy objects and blurry maps of workplace learning. This
responsibility is not just about, or even mostly about, normative purposes associated
with ‘making a (positive) difference’, but about making difference that resists the press
to seek similarity. Making difference resists the assumption that learning is one
universally-understood phenomenon and that all workplace learning purposes are
benignly aligned: making difference is about highlighting distinctions and provoking
debates, as well as about building the partial connections that may be possible between
those distinctions.