[-empyre-] FW: Research in Practice, week three, January 21-28

[Adrian Miles]

On Wednesday, 23 January 2013 at 11:37 PM, Phi Shu wrote:

> what if the candidate already understands and sees the writing as nothing more than a hoop jumping exercise to get the piece of paper? The final requirements that need to be fulfilled to actually pass, and get the accreditation, will be much the same for everyone, but the same can't be said of the PhD process itself. Perhaps there are practitioners who use the PhD to get an academic accreditation for doing stuff they might have done anyway, in which case the PhD is valuable in terms of providing them with a block of time to focus exclusively on production, and on improving technical aspects of their practice. But this doesn't mean to say that the PhD process will be easy for them, or that they won't be faced with challenges that lead them to think differently about their work. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
in these contexts I'd argue with the candidate (if I were supervising) that they have misunderstood what research is. As with creative practice it is not the reporting upon or about the already known but an engaged undertaking to find out about what you don't already know the answer to. As quite a few have noted in this discussion, when engaged with in this sort of way the outcomes are surprising, valuable, and enhance practice.  

On the other hand many PhD candidates approach their writing in this manner. In my experience they might do OK, but they won't end up with a career that intersects both sectors in the way that someone like Keith's does. Which, of course, is their call, but in an economy of diminishing places and increasing expectations universities as places to support and enable creative practice are also requiring things that it can legitimately identify as research. 

Universities train and educate creative practitioners, but that has been a separate enterprise to research (we teach and we do research) and I am unsure at what point someone decided universities were no longer education and research institutions but also de facto arts funding bodies. 

It's a harsh comment, but I'm in Melbourne and no one can thrown a bottle that far :-) However quite a bit of the discussion here revolves around an assumption that practice is sufficient in itself (which it is) but in a university context it is not. And before the bottles come my way, as Simon and Keith have pointed out, there are many disciplines that are practice based. Teaching is one. I teach, a lot, and I do a lot of what I would describe as research around pedagogy. Yet there is no reasonable way where I can claim that my innovative, disruptive and creative teaching is a research practice and therefore sufficient in itself and so I don't have to write about, publish, present, about pedagogy. If I want it to be research I do. I must not only communicate these things to a relevant community but in a manner that is evidence based and contestable. Practice in itself is not enough to generate what university's understand research to be. 

Some will argue we should change universities so that practice is sufficient in itself. I'm not in that camp, for the reasons I think Keith's (and Sally Jane) outlined very well. The issue *for me* is not only that I don't think practice = research but then it lets me call my teaching research, and my interactive video research, and the designer describe their professional practice as research, and the lawyer their pro bono work as research. Yet in each case just because we do these things - they are our practice - it doesn't automatically follow that we are a) researching, b) researching that contributes to knowledge rather than replicates the already known, c) creating artefacts that allows the implications and significance of these practices to matter to others. 

-- 
an appropriate closing
Adrian Miles
Program Director Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours)
RMIT University - www.rmit.edu.au
http://vogmae.net.au/



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20130124/8ee2d467/attachment.htm>