Becoming a lecturer in nurse education: the work-place learning of clinical experts as newcomers

This project investigates the experiences of nurses who have been recently appointed as lecturers in higher education. Successful nurses and clinical experts suddenly find themselves to be ‘newcomers’ in many aspects of their role when they are appointed to a lecturer post in higher education. The project uses a work-place learning theoretical framework and builds on previous work on becoming an academic. The continuing professional development and contribution of this group of staff have significant impact on the effectiveness of nursing education. The key data source for this small-scale qualitative enquiry is semi-structured interviews with nine nurse lecturers within their first four years of appointment to a case study higher education institution. Additional data on the work-place context are provided by interviews with three line managers and analysis of institutional documents related to the appointment, induction and continuing professional development of academic staff.

The new nurse lecturers generally find their transition to higher education challenging and confusing because of the tensions in their subject, their department and their original practitioner profession, over what a lecturer should be. Their work-place includes a complexity of overlapping communities of practice including subject groups, teaching teams, and clinical placement networks. The different communities require them to emphasize different elements of their identity. The experiences of the new nurse lecturers tend to encourage them to hold on to existing identities as clinical practitioners rather than embrace new identities as academics.

The study has implications for all of those concerned with enhancing the academic work-place as a learning environment for lecturers in professional education fields such as nursing. These include the need to recognize and respond to tensions within the work-place and to nurture non-formal collaborative learning.