The Research Teaching nexus and its potential to enhance the opportunities of those teaching Higher Education in Further Education Colleges

The paper reports on the enhancement of HE in FECs specifically Higher Education Institution (HEI) collaborative partnership colleges and their staff and mirroring the academic practice of offering enhancement opportunities within the HEI to promote research informed teaching. The main body of the paper reports on the background and developments of one HEI, which allowed me to build up a series of cumulative case studies that developed capability in and around the research teaching nexus as strategy to address the challenge of building a HE research culture in an HE environment in FECs. The findings demonstrate a shift in thinking through lecturers active participation in a series of enhancement events, which revealed scholarly capability and independence of knowledge, judgements practice and ownership of research base in a culture that was previously known to be “research deficit” (Davy, 2009, p.11).