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

[Phi Shu]

>
> @Adrian Miles
>

you state below: "Some will argue we should change universities so that
practice is sufficient in itself. I'm not in that camp..."

My PhD experience was that there was a lot of nudge nudge wink wink,
my superiors were practitioners/academics, in fact, they mostly
self-identified as practitioners, but, quite clearly   their ability to
create at the level they might once have aspired to (volume of practice
based outputs) was severely compromised by their role as academics, yet,
everyone played along, in some respects it was disheartening to see,
the attitude was that these are the sacrifices you have to make if you want
to be a creative practitioner and stay in academia.

However, many of them accepted that practice based outputs are capable of
being novel contributions to knowledge. The written component was viewed as
secondary, nothing more than a formality. The attitude was that on paper
you need to be able to dress it up as research, you need to tick
the boxes so that the "suits" get the impression some "real"
research has been conducted, otherwise the money for the department will
dry up.

Now, its not that there weren't people doing "real research," of course
there were, it was simply that there was an understanding that creative
practice was in itself a valid form of research.Practice based creative
outputs speak, and the PhD examiners are qualified to decide whether or not
such work is saying what it needs to say to be
considered valid "research".

Quite clearly, in the context of creative practice, knowledge can
be communicated in many different ways, therefore upholding the written
word as the de facto method of assessment is a mistake and I think it is
the duty of academics in this area to communicate to those holding the
purse strings that actually, the written word is not the only means
of communicating valid research outcomes.








>
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> 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/****
>
> ** **
>
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