I thought moving from further education teaching to teaching in higher education would be a natural step: preparing lifelong learning teachers to work in HE, or preparing them to carry on keeping their heads above water?

This collaborative study explores the transitions of three former Further Education teachers, at different points in their academic careers, into Higher Education teaching. We suggest that this transition inevitably brings a number of personal and professional challenges. With an increasing move towards performativity via target setting, results and accountability, a great deal of academics' time and energy is governed by a managerial-driven system based on close scrutiny of paperwork, and increasing emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) in work environments where job security is unstable due to redundancies and restructuring. This often leaves academics fearful of their job security, exhausted and reluctant to challenge the hegemony based on quantifiable outcomes whereby notions of critical autonomy and creativity are eroded. The data draws on life history methodology and narrative enquiry. It explores our stories and the process of what Clough (2002: 81) describes as ‘focused conversations'. It moves from viewing society as a disembodied structure, and instead sets our narratives against the backdrop of cultural, historical and political landscape, providing a life history methodology that allows us to make sense of our transitions through our connections. The intertwining of our narratives provides an insight into how university lecturers engage in shaping a professional identity, and leads us to suggest that communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998; Wenger et al. 2002) can support and develop teachers' critical autonomy and creativity in their early career and beyond. Clough, P., & Nutbrown, C. (2002), A student's guide to methodology. London: Sage. Hochschild, A. (1983), The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participating. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity. Wenger, E. McDermott, R. & Snyder, W.M. (2002), Cultivating communities of Practice. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.