This article contributes to understanding of the professional learning of expert school teachers when they are appointed as university-based teacher educators. In this case study of a single department a qualitative analysis is used to interpret the transcripts of 16 semi-structured interviews with lecturers in teacher education within four years of their appointment to higher education roles. They experience tensions within the educational partnership and professional field about the value of abstract knowledge compared with work-based practice and about what a lecturer in teacher education should be. The situated learning of the new lecturers within their particular departmental context encourages them to hold on to their existing identities as school teachers, rather than embrace new identities as academics. (Contains 1 figure.)