How can what we need co-exist with what we’ve got? Developing professional development opportunities that reflect the identities and pedagogies of Further Education lecturers.

How can what we need co-exist with what we’ve got? Developing professional development opportunities that reflect the identities and pedagogies of Further Education lecturers. Samantha Jones: work completed for MSc in Learning and Teaching at the University of Oxford. Development of practice in a constrained and constraining environment is an increasingly common narrative across education. It is often argued that the further education sector (FE), is amongst the most challenging in terms of budget constraints and profession recognition. The professional development of FE lecturers is an issue that is an under theorised, and often neglected area of both practice and research. Often dominated by models of development, which largely ignore the dual identity, and pedagogic traditions of these lecturers. This often results in ineffective experiences for lecturers. To address this problem I worked with lecturers in two areas of practice in a large, general, FE college - Higher Education and Vocational Education - to facilitate development of a CPD intervention which they felt responded to their identity and pedagogical needs. Changes in identity and pedagogy were measured through observation and pre/post-intervention Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955), interviews, and data analysis using a socio-cultural lens. I found that both identity and pedagogy appeared to influence choices of CPD intervention, but were also shifted by the CPD interventions themselves. The data suggested a complex relationship between pedagogy, skills and identity, as skills developed identity either shifted or was confirmed, and both skills and identity appeared to be replicated within pedagogy. However, the developed identities appeared to conflict with the constrained and constraining environment. Lecturers appeared to have insufficient agency to shift roles, constrained by the college’s apparent unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the new identities. These findings highlight the underlying tensions in the sector, and suggest the complexity of developing skills and knowledge in a constrained sector. However, the findings also point to principles that could be followed, and developments that could be made at a local level that could begin the process of change, whilst working within the parameters of current challenges. Further, I argue they point to a sector wide failure to understand the skills required of an FE lecturer, clarification of which will do much to ensure that the sector’s lecturers have the skills to meet future challenges.