This paper discusses data collected as part of a larger, ongoing qualitative research project exploring the practices of higher education (HE), and how these serve to include or exclude students from participation in the community of HE. Using a Communities of Practice framework (Wenger, 1998), informed by notions of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and situated cognition (Lave, 1997) previous work has explored practice, participation and community from the perspective of students in transition to HE (O’Donnell & Tobbell, 2007). The present paper takes as its focus data collected from semi-structured interviews with university teachers, as well as email conversations between university teachers. Analysis, taking a grounded theory approach, reveals university teachers’ conceptualisations of learning, how these manifest in different approaches to teaching and in an emphasis on different HE practices. In addition, as both teachers and researchers, academic staff experience tensions between the valued practices of these two communities, and the extent to which these are negotiated is revealed in their academic identities. We conclude that university teachers’ notions of learning are individualistic, and that learning in HE can usefully be viewed as process which is distributed across the whole community of learners, teachers, contexts and practices, rather than an a process which occurs within individual learners.

Taking a qualitative approach, the research uses a semi-structured interview methodology, but also makes use of the content of email conversations as sources of data.

We conclude that university teachers’ notions of of what learning is, and what a university teacher's role is, are individualistic, and that learning in HE can usefully be viewed as process which is distributed across the whole community of learners, teachers, contexts and practices, rather than an a process which occurs within individual learners.