Creating and consolidating capacities among Australian show people

Creating and consolidating a wide range of capacities are crucial to the continued sustainability of Australian show people’s aspirations and activities as a form of business, a type of community and a way of life. Drawing on a large-scale, multi-year corpus of qualitative, semi-structured interview data with several show families and the teachers of their children, this chapter presents a theoretically framed account of show people’s working capacities and their strategies for building those capacities based on the useful conceptual distinctions between formal and informal learning and between lifelong and lifewide learning. The chapter also highlights those capacities that have been facilitated by the show people’s previous and current experiences of formal educational provision and those that have been constrained by such provision. The author argues that a transformative approach to educating mobile workers like the Australian show people entails the construction and enhancement of capabilities simultaneously on the showgrounds and in the classroom. This argument has important implications for the ongoing theorisation of capacities and for understanding how and why capacities can be developed and/or destroyed in particular contexts.