Abstract:

The presentation will report on the enhancement of Higher Education (HE) in Further Education Colleges (FECs), specifically from the perspective of a Higher Education Institution (HEI) and its work with collaborative partnership colleges and their lecturing staff. The HE in FE lecturing staff, as participants, were provided with a comparable academic practice of enhancement opportunities akin to their awarding HEI partners with an aim to promote research and scholarly activities. The presentation and paper reports on the background and developments of one HEI, which allowed the build up of a series of cumulative case studies that developed capability in and around the research teaching nexus as a strategy to address the challenge of building a HE research culture in an the environment of FECs. The findings demonstrate a cultural shift, made possible through lecturers’ active participation in a series of enhancement events, which revealed scholarly capability and independence of knowledge, judgement, and practice in ultimately establishing their ownership of a research base in a culture that was previously described as “research deficit.”

Keywords:

Higher Education, Further Education, Research, Teaching, Nexus, relationship.