Professor Sheila Peace
Sheila is Professor of Social Gerontology. She is a professorial member of the Faculty Research Sub-Committee; the REF group and the PG research supervisor's group as well as a long-term member of the OU Human Participants and Materials Ethics Committee.
Sheila is a Course Team Member for K101: Understanding Health and Social Care as well as the new course in production: K319: Ageing, Adulthood and the Life Course where she is co-editing the course reader. She currently supervises two full-time and one part-time post graduate students.
External to the OU, Sheila acts as a link between the British Society of Gerontology (BSG) and the International Longevity Centre-UK which is linked to the House of Lords. She recently came to the end of a 6 year term on the executive of the BSG. She continues as the Faculty representative on the Coalition for Better Care.
Professor Jan Draper
Following a clinical background in adult nursing, Jan moved into higher education in the late 1980s, supporting students on both pre-and post-qualifying nursing programmes at a range of different academic levels. Over the last ten years this has been predominantly in the field of distance learning, firstly with the RCN Institute and, since 2007, at The Open University. Jan is responsible for leading the development and delivery of high quality, flexible, work-based learning solutions for the nursing and healthcare workforce. This includes UK-wide education provision for healthcare support workers (including a unique, part-time pre-registration nursing programme by distance learning) and registered nurses. Central to her approach is a desire that all education should, in some way, make an impact on practice and my education and research activity is predicated on this one, central aim. Jan has experience of a range of research projects under the broad heading of ‘life course transitions’. Her early research interest was in the area of maternity services and, in particular, the experience of service users and their representatives. My PhD (1995-2000) developed this interest and used an ethnographic approach to explore men’s experiences of their transition to fatherhood. This prompted an interest in a number of conceptual frameworks including transition theory and the sociology of the body, both of which she has subsequently used in other empirical and writing projects. A second research theme relates to professional work-based learning including student support in practice, the transition to registered practitioner and beyond and, in particular, the impact of learning on practice
