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Further education colleges in England, which offer a wide range of post-school education and training provision, have undergone major transformations in the past decade, resulting in considerable changes to the work of those involved in teaching in colleges. This paper examines the development of professional identity, as a means of exploring how cultures of learning and teaching are developing and changing in the sector. The paper considers the formation of professional identity amongst a group of trainee lecturers completing a one year full-time teacher training course at a university in the English Midlands. Lave and Wenger"s (1991) work on apprenticeship to communities of practice is used to examine the effect of trainees" teaching placement on the development of professional identity. However, rather than identifying effective processes of increasing participation in existing communities of practice, the study highlights a strong sense of marginalisation and alienation amongst trainees. The paper argues that this is detrimental to both trainees and experienced lecturers if they are to actively engage in building new forms of professionalism for the future. 4Becoming a lecturer in further education in England: the construction of professional identity and the role of communities of practice. [ 1] IntroductionIn the UK, as in many other countries, learning has become a central concern of government policy-makers. Learning is seen as the key to economic competitiveness, social stability and active citizenship (see for example DfEE, 1998; DTI and DfEE, 2001; DfES, 2002; Social Exclusion Unit, 1999). Widening participation and raising achievement in all forms of learning, education and training, conceived of as a lifelong endeavour, are seen as imperative to the success and well-being of individuals, communities, industry and the nation.Interventions by policy-makers to define what learning should involve and how it should be carried out are redefining what it means to be a teacher or lecturer across all sectors of the education and training system. Ball (1999, 2003) graphically describes the impact of current changes on teaching professionals as "the struggle for the soul of the teacher". While policy is seen to be driving teachers into an increasingly managerial and performative mode, where measurement of productivity and displays of "quality" are paramount, there is a growing body of literature from educational researchers, which seeks to identify 5 opportunities for teachers to maintain and develop critical understandings of their role, based on values of critical democracy and social justice (see for example Avis, 1999;Sachs, 2001;Shain and Gleeson, 1999). Set against this context, the forming and re-forming of professional identity are seen as increasingly significant and contested. The concern here is not simply with teachers" identities in themselves, but with how their identities may contribute fundamentally to the nature of the teaching and learning process.In this paper, we focus on the...

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The last five years have seen a radical transformation in adult education in England with a concentrated emphasis on national basic skills provision. This was prompted initially by a government response to low levels of literacy in the British adult population, identified by an influential international survey, showing unfavourable comparisons with other European countries. The response to the disclosure that seven million adults in England were not functionally literate saw the creation in 2001 of a national basic skills strategy in England entitled Skills for Life. It is a far-reaching strategy creating a new infrastructure to support adult basic skills learning opportunities over a seven-year period. It also created the entitlement to free basic skills learning opportunities, as a cornerstone to creating national economic competitiveness and social cohesion. Such an entitlement could be interpreted as a commitment to providing wider access to foundation skills for adults who had previously missed out, as part of a lifelong learning agenda. However, a critical reading of the policy texts, and recent funding priorities, show the strategy rooted more in a response to what is perceived as the skills demands of a knowledge economy for global competitiveness than to issues of social inclusion and increased opportunities for lifelong learning. The result of this may well be the creation of new sites of inequality that affect older women and adult ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners disproportionately, the very people that are identified as being needed to fill skill gaps in the economy.

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