Edinburgh Napier University

  Life Sciences teaching-focused academics working in UK universities have been an expanding and emergent group in the past two decades. However, despite their successes in supporting and innovation in Life Sciences higher education, there is an anxiety amongst this group with respect to the currency of their discipline-specific skills and their resultant ability to teach and supervise at upper undergraduate, and postgraduate levels. Some teaching-focused academics expressed a wish to return to the lab in order to refresh their disciplinary skills. Using the lens of Wenger’s Communities of Practice, this study seeks to examine the brokerage activities between teaching-focused and research-focused Life Science academics, and how disciplinary and pedagogic knowledge is exchanged. Preliminary findings indicate that there are a variety of possibilities for exchange of both disciplinary and pedagogic knowledge, although departmental culture and organisation may sometimes impede such exchange.