Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators
Editors, Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth and Isabelle Bourdon
Publisher, Information Age Publishing
As a two volume set:
Hard cover ISBN: 1593118678
,
Soft cover ISBN: 159311866X
As separate volumes:
Hard Cover - Vol 1 ISBN: 1593118635
,
Vol 2 ISBN: 1593118651
Soft Cover - Vol 1 ISBN: 1593118627
,
Vol 2 ISBN: 1593118643
Volume 1, Chapter 5 - Communities of Practice and Part-time Lecturers: Opportunities and Challenges in Higher Education
Abstract
This chapter considers the experiences of part-time lecturers in Higher Education (HE). Part-time lecturers, who work on an hourly-paid and non-permanent basis, are an important but often overlooked feature of Universities and Colleges. Access to formal development processes that permanently employed academics take for granted is often difficult for part-time lecturers. The Communities of Practice (CoP) framework is used to make sense of part-time lecturers' experiences expressed as part of an action research project undertaken in 2003-5 in a UK University Business School. The chapter establishes the need for a re-examination of the role of part-time lecturers in HE and shows the part that Communities of Practice can play in achieving this.
Authors
