Becoming a professional educator: induction of newly appointed lecturers in teacher and nurse education

We now work in higher education, one of us in academic development, but we have had previous practitioner roles and identities as a nurse and as a school teacher. Our ongoing project is investigating the experiences of newly appointed lecturers in professional subject discipline areas, seeking to evaluate relevant concepts from literature on workplace learning and enhance academic induction for these groups of staff. We are focusing on the experiences of new lecturers in nursing and in initial teacher education who have been appointed to higher education lecturer posts after professional experience respectively in nursing and in school-teaching. Successful expert professionals suddenly find themselves to be novices in many aspects of their new role as an academic. In addition, the educational partnerships and subject disciplines in which they work involve considerable tensions between professional and academic perspectives