Changing Professional Identity in the Transition from Practitioner to Lecturer in Higher Education: an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

This research explores the experiences of five professional practitioners from disciplines including teaching, youth work, sport and health who had become lecturers in Higher Education. Their experiences are considered using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and tentative conclusions are reached on the meaning of such experiences for the individuals. The work extends previous studies (Shreeve 2010, 2011; Gourlay 2011a, 2011b; Boyd & Harris 2010) to consider the relationship between knowledge and influence and how institutional preference for knowledge gained from research impacts on the validity of knowledge derived from professional experience. The research finds shared feelings associated with inauthenticity and loss arising from concerns that the contribution of the professional in Higher Education is undervalued. The research challenges the assumption that professional practitioners adopt the professional identity of a lecturer in Higher Education instead finding that they create their own professional identities in the liminal space between the professional and academic domains, but points to difficulties associated with constructed nature of such professional identities within the institutional structure of a Higher Education institution.

Why is Research Still Invisible in Further Education?

This article takes as its starting point earlier research reported by Geoffrey Elliott in 1996. That study found that research was consistantly marginalised in the FE sector, and identified a number of structural factors that contributed to this ‘invisibility’. This new study draws upon a small sample of lecturers who belong to a Further and Higher Education Early Years Partnership. Through the participants’ voices and perspectives, the authors identify continuing dissonance and issues of research marginalisation. The discussion also highlights contemporary educational discourse, with its predominant focus upon measurable value at the expense of values, as a key factor in sustaining a culture that is antithetic to thoughtful reflection and research. The authors identify the development of a ‘collaborative centralised’ research community as critical to an alternative possibility for research in further education.