Scholarship in the discipline and higher education: The need for a fusion epistemology focused on academic identity

The past decade has seen a significantly greater emphasis placed upon scholarly approaches to teaching and learning in Australian universities and internationally (Brawley, Kelly, & Timmins, 2009; Hubball, Clarke, & Poole, 2010; Vardi, 2011). For many, this shift represents long-overdue recognition of the centrality and importance of learning and teaching activities in higher education (Boyer, 1990; Chalmers, 2011). For individual academics, however, opportunities to engage more fully in teaching and learning may also present challenges to their core identities as discipline scholars and practitioners and may even involve an epistemological shift towards educational and even managerial orientations (Ramsden, 1998). These transitions and transformations are seldom easy and often present challenges not only to an academic’s own sense of identity, but to their relationships with colleagues and peers within and outside their disciplines.