Prior to taking up this post in January 2010, Tara spent her academic career in Canada – most recently as Professor and Head of Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research and publications have been concerned with the changing arrangements of work practices in settings ranging from small businesses to health care to garment factories, and their effects on what counts as knowledge and what happens to practitioners. She has written extensively about work learning in relation to gender, work identities, networks, self-employment, critical human resource development, and social responsibility (for full list see www.ioe.stir.ac.uk/staff/ProfessorTaraFenwick.php). Her book Learning Through Experience: Troubling Assumptions and Intersecting Questions (Krieger, 2003) was granted the 2004 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Adult Education Literature by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education.

Tara has enjoyed rich collaborations with colleagues around the world. She has keynoted over two dozen major conferences in Australia, Scandinavia, Canada and the UK, and was recently honored to deliver the Julius Nyerere lecture in South Africa. She has been invited as visiting professor to the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Technology at Sydney, Aarhus University in Copenhagen, and University of South Australia. Through a four-year project in the People’s Republic of China she produced, with co-author Jim Parsons, a book series for teachers that won the 2003 Book of the Year award in Alberta. Since moving to the UK, she has become a member of the ESRC’s Evaluation Committee and its International Network. She now serves on the editorial boards for seven journals including Vocations and Learning, Adult Education Quarterly, Management Learning, and Human Resource Development International. Her fourth book with Routledge is about to be released in August 2011, co-edited with Professor Lesley Farrell: Knowledge Mobilisation in Educational Research: Politics, Languages and Responsibilities.

Her current remit at Stirling is broad and interdisciplinary: to promote innovative, critical studies of professional knowledge, practices and learning across domains such as health care, management, social services, policing and education, and to explore effective new approaches to support professional learning in workplaces as well as in higher education and community. ProPEL’s projects are qualitative and collaborative, involving several PhD students and postdocs as well as research associates across Europe/UK, North America and Australia. She welcomes links with colleagues committed to understanding and supporting professionals’ knowledge and wellbeing amidst dramatic shifts in practice and regulation: www.propel.stir.ac.uk