A paper from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
Teaching in higher education is increasingly coming under public scrutiny. As a response to this and partly because of research specialisation arising out of the Research Excellence Framework (formerly the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) assessment) the number of academics on teaching-only contracts is increasing. This paper presents a study on how teaching-only academics within Engineering Mathematics and Computing disciplinary areas at a research intensive institution are conceptualising their academic identities. To ensure the confidentiality of the research participants pseudonyms have been used for both the research participants and the research intensive institution. Findings from this study appear to confirm that the teaching-only academic identity is the wrong sort of identity to have in a research intensive institution.
