Chapter 5: Communities Of Practice And Part-Time Lecturers: Opportunities and Challenges in Higher Education

This chapter considers the experiences of part-time lecturers in higher education (HE). Part-time lecturers, who work on an hourly paid and nonpermanent 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 lectur-ers. 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 2003-2005 in a U.K. university business school. The chapter establishes the need for a reexamination of the role of part-time lecturers in HE and shows the part that CoPs can play in achieving this.