ABSTRACT
This chapter tells a tale of insider/outsider – or outsider/insider – positioning. The story arises out of ongoing, collaborative, autoethnographic, critical, action research involving myself and thirty-five lecturers working in the Graduate School of Arts and Education1 (GSAE) within the Faculty of Education at a ‘post-1992’2
university in the UK. I’ll call the institution New University. The project was originally conceived of as a strategy that would contribute to
the School’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme. As such, the key aim has been to support those who, whilst experienced HE teachers, are new to the sort of research and writing demanded of academics by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)3 (Sikes, 2006). In addition, the undertaking has also been approached and framed as a research project focussing on ‘developing a research culture in a new university’.
