Sexual harassment in the creative industries

Women often have to consider it 'part of the job' and tolerate it if they want to get ahead professionally, write Sophie Hennekam and Dawn Bennet

The urgent need for career preview: Student expectations and graduate realities in music and dance

Unlike the work available in many creative disciplines, musicians and dancers have the possibility of full-time, company-based employment; however, participants far outweigh the number of available positions. As a result, many graduates become ‘enforced entrepreneurs’ as they shape their work to meet personal and professional needs. This paper first explores the career projections of 58 music and dance students who were surveyed in their first week of post-secondary study. It then contrasts these findings with the reality of graduate careers as reported by five of that cohort four years later. In contrast with the students’ overwhelming focus on performance roles, the graduate cohort reported a prevalence of portfolio careers incorporating both creative and non-creative roles. The paper characterises the notion of a performing arts ‘career’ as a messy concept fraught with misunderstanding. Implications include the need to heighten students’ career awareness and position intrinsic satisfaction as a valued career concept

Developing teacher identity among music performance students

The mythologised image of the musician as performer often contradicts the reality. This article reports initial results from a study that used learner-generated drawings and journal reflections with music performance majors as a means to examine emerging perceptions of music teaching. Whilst initial drawings illustrated traditional images of the teacher as knowledge giver, these gave way to more fluid and student-centred images in which students appeared to identify with teaching in new ways. The combination of textual and non-textual data provided insights that would not otherwise have been evident, and the broad consideration of 'possible selves' became a useful tool in the explorations of identity and career

Creative Migration: a Western Australian case study of creative artists

It is well known that a pilgrimage overseas can be crucial to the career development of specialist creative artists. All too often, however, the pilgrimage becomes a permanent migration. Significantly, the loss of this creative talent is not limited to the national level. The dominance of cities as the centres of Australia's knowledge-based economy leads also to migration of creative artists from regional centres and from smaller cities such as Perth, lessening the potential for those regions to attract and retain creative and innovative people. Given the globalised nature of the cultural industries and the emergence of new technologies, this study of Western Australian creative artists whether migration loss could be repositioned as cultural gain. Initial results suggest that spatial separation due to geographic isolation is particularly problematic for Western Australian creative artists both within the regions and the metropolitan area. Despite participants' strong personal connections with Western Australia, artistic connections were tenuous and artistic involvement was negligible. Implications include the need to actively engage with creative migrants by fostering their continued involvement in the cultural life of cities and regions

Shifting the cantus firmus: Australian music educators and the ERA

Managing the teaching-research-creative practice nexus is a concern for everyone working in higher music education, particularly those involved with the supervision and mentorship of graduate students and early career academics. This paper takes as its subject the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), drawing examples from research frameworks elsewhere to identify some of the pertinent issues facing music educators and their students. The findings from a series of surveys and short interviews suggest that the formal recognition of artistic research remains largely dependent on the articulation of that research into traditional academic language. Furthermore, the increasing focus on research as a form of revenue generation highlights the separation of research and teaching and the lessening of academic autonomy. The paper argues that a balance can be achieved only with a fundamental, systemic shift that recognises the new knowledge and innovative methodological approaches within artistic research and, equally, within the scholarship of teaching

Creative and educational spaces: The musician in higher education

Conservatoires and universities are both creative and educational spaces. As major employers of musicians, negotiating the nexus of teaching-research-creative practice within higher education is a critical concern for music faculty and students. This paper takes as its subject the newly introduced Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), drawing on the experience of other research frameworks to identify some of the pertinent issues facing musicians in academia. The paper suggests that whilst creative practice is increasingly recognized as research, it is rarely judged as being research in its own right or as having equal status to traditional scientific research. Findings strengthen the argument that conceptualizing and communicating the research inherent within creative practice can give musicians both artistic and intellectual agency over the commentary that surrounds their work. However, successfully negotiating the translation of creative work into a language understood by the academy requires skills that are often far removed from creative practice. Added to increasing pressure to producetraditional written research within a narrow band of highly ranked journals, the findings suggest the need to develop a range of academic writing skills and conceptual approaches early in the training of graduate students and for new faculty. For musicians to find a balance between the creative and educational spaces of higher education, the paper presents a case for individualized support accompanied by a systemic shift that acknowledges the value, new forms of knowledge and innovative approaches within creative practice and research. The articulation of creative processes to a broad audience may prove to be a major step towards gaining this acknowledgement

Meeting society’s expectations of graduates: Education for the public good

Employability is a vital lynchpin in the balancing act between student, community, government and industry expectations of higher education and what the sector can deliver. The potential for higher education to educate for the public good has never been higher because the sector has never been larger or more diverse. In the year 1970, only 700 million people worldwide had accessed secondary or higher education; by the year 2100 this will have increased ten-fold to some seven billion people (Roser & Nagdy, 2018). Will there be seven billion graduate-level jobs by the end of this century? As I will argue in this chapter, access to jobs does not adequately describe the purpose of higher education. If higher education is to survive, the definition of employability, higher education’s role in its development and governments’ strategies for its measurement, must change. The exponential rise in post-primary education is indicative of global growth in higher education over the past four decades. To give a country-specific example, in 1971 only 2% of the Australian population had participated in higher education and this grew to almost 20% in the subsequent 40 years (Parr, 2015). In 2018, higher education engagement will have reached almost 50% of the Australian population (Roser & Nagdy, 2018)

Making and Managing Knowledge in the “New” Humanities: An Australian Experience

The innovative ways in which humanities academics give shape and meaning to traditional and artistic research has attracted increasing attention as researchers address ever-more complex issues. This attention stems in part from the problematic frameworks in which academic research is situated, but it relates also to growing concerns that traditional “scientific” research approaches do not always provide an adequate model for research, including some of what is happening in the sciences. In this paper the focus is on knowledge relating to artistic research. Implications include managing the translation of artistic research into a form that can be understood (and learned from) by the wider academy, and accommodating artistic research output within research frameworks less flexible than the works they assess

Identity as a catalyst for success

Success as a musician is most commonly assumed to be the attainment of a performance career; however, careers solely in performance are rare, often short-lived, and not desirable to everyone. This paper is drawn from a study which explored the perception of the musician as a performer, and which sought to find out whether practising musicians would support redefining their profession to encompass those working within non-performance roles. It presents the results of two focus groups held with musicians working in performance and non-performance roles. The musicians were asked: ?What is a musician?? The ensuing debate encompassed notions of success, career expectations, performance careers, and the importance of intrinsic career satisfaction. Participants suggested that musicians? careers continually evolve according to available opportunities and both professional and personal needs. The definition of the musician as a performer was found to lack specificity and to suggest an unrealistic perception of the profession of music. The results of this study support the argument that the term musician needs to be redefined; that redefinition has support within the profession; and that music educators have a crucial role to play in encouraging students to consider what kinds of musician they would like to be