In the past few years, there has been some interestingdebate on the notion of postgraduate research by the exegesis route, which is currently the most favoured approach to higher degree qualification in the creative arts arena. The production of an artwork, which is accompanied by scholarly written exposition, has become a well-accepted way in which cultural and social knowledge is generated within the creative disciplines. Some problems, however, still remain with the quality supervision of creative arts postgraduate students because of the concurrent requirements of having a supervisor with a significant reputation in the student's field of creative endeavour and the skills to advise on the preparation of the scholarly document that expounds on the creative work. In addition, because of the recent history of the exegesis route to higher degrees, there are relatively few experienced research staff in creative arts departments. At the University of Ballarat's Arts Academy, we have been developing an approachto the supervisionof creative Masters and Doctoral exegeses in the context of small staff numbers, a wide variety of practice areas, and a relatively large number of enrolled students. Results to date have been encouraging, and this paper will report on the way in which we are attempting to provide each studnet with the best educational experience possible and produce world-class creative higher degree graduates within a school that has a limited financial and personnel resource baseE

Button, Loris

Mann, Allan

Sillitoe, Jim

Federation ResearchOnline

1Underpinning Practice-Based Creative Research withQuality SupervisionJames F. SillitoeVictoria University, Office for Postgraduate ResearchAllan R. MannUniversity of Ballarat, Arts AcademyLoris ButtonUniversity of Ballarat, Arts AcademyIntroductionThe nature of the characteristics determining the practice of scholarly research that is carriedout in the university system has been a growing and eventful topic of debate in recent times.Following the traditional ‘mono-method’ or ‘purist’ era of research which held sway inuniversities until the 1960s (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998), in the social and behavioural sciencesthere emerged the ‘mixed methodology’ period which, because of its inherent controversies(Snow, 1993), was accompanied by the phenomenon that some called the ‘paradigm wars’ (forexample Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Of particular interest here is that the resulting discussions andeventual clarification of alternative positions that mostly settled down in the mid-1990s, broughtwith them a much more liberal definition of knowledge-generation into research schools. Thisoutcome has contributed, in our opinion, to a strengthening of the whole of research educationas a result of the codification and acceptance of multiple epistemologies as legitimate areas ofpostgraduate education.It was during this period of intense qualitative / quantitative (or positivist / constructionist) debatethat universities experienced significant pressure for the introduction of postgraduate degrees inthe creative arts. The situation of the negotiated outcomes between the positivist andconstructionist paradigms mentioned above contributed in large measure to the subsequentemergence and acceptance of subjectivist research in the academy and, along with it, theparallel development of the exegesis route in the creative arts for postgraduate research. Mostuniversities are now familiar with postgraduate research by the exegesis route, which iscurrently the most favoured approach to higher degree qualification in the creative arts area.The production of an innovative artwork, which is accompanied by scholarly written exposition,has become an important vector for the generation of cultural and social knowledge within theuniversity.Notwithstanding the current institutional acceptance of the exegesis route as havingequivalence with the more traditional by-research programs, there is still some important debateto be had on the precise formulation of the exegesis structure. In a useful summary of thesituation, Sullivan (2005) suggests that the key issue here hinges on the changing focus of2theory in higher education research. In particular, for practice-based doctorates that includecreative artworks, there is a question of ‘where does the knowledge lie?’ Is the theorising that isessential to a doctoral study encapsulated within the artwork? Or is it explicated in theexegesis? Or should there be a combination of these two residences? For some, suggestsSullivan (2005), ‘an explanatory exegesis is seen as redundant because it fails to acknowledgethat art-making can be research’, whilst ‘for others, the inclusion of an exegesis thatcontextualises the research is necessary’ (Candlin, 2000; Webb, 2000; cited in Sullivan, 2005).Within this debate, we fall into the latter school. Whilst we agree with Sullivan’s (2005) commentthat ‘pathways [to visual arts research] remain to be sketched in greater detail, we stronglybelieve that the development of the ‘artist-theorist’ or ‘artist-researcher’ as a critical figure inhigher education research is best supported by a transparent and scholarly approach that canbe shared and appreciated by the wider academic community. As adherents to this perspective,we see in the exegesis an important opportunity for creative artists to share with the widercommunity the concepts, ideas and insights that have led them to the production of the creativework that has been submitted for examination. This is in no way to diminish or to question theprimacy of the artwork as the central contribution to knowledge. It is rather to systematise thedevelopment of a document that will ensure that the essential message contained in theresearch is communicated in a scholarly way to an audience that is, in the main, accustomed tounderstanding written texts. In addition, we feel that this is a chance to provide, for audiencesunfamiliar with creative works, an opportunity to understand and learn from the perspectivesand concerns of postgraduate research in the creative areas.The development of a scholarly exegesisNotwithstanding the importance of the decision to pursue the route of written exegesis forpostgraduate masters and doctoral qualifications, problems still remain with the practice ofquality supervision in the creative arts. Some of these problems arise from the selection of anappropriate supervisor. There are concurrent requirements implicit here of having a supervisorwith (i) a significant reputation in the student’s field of creative endeavour who is able to adviseon the development of the portfolio and (ii) the skills and experience to advise on thepreparation of the scholarly exegesis that expounds on the creative work at a level consistentwith university standards. Because of the relatively short history of the exegesis route to higherdegrees, there are few Arts Academy staff who have had the opportunity to pursue their owndoctoral studies, and therefore there is a dearth of experienced research supervision staff in thecreative arts.In addition, and equally as important, there are factors that, although external to the researchprocess, nevertheless impinge upon the ability of a faculty to provide high quality supervision.For a numerically small faculty such as the University of Ballarat’s Arts Academy, there is arange of linked problems that must be satisfactorily dealt with when supervising creativeMasters and Doctoral research programs. Supervisors must be provided for research studentsin an institutional context of: a small number of staff being responsible for severalundergraduate programs; a responsibility to meet the needs of a relatively large number of3enrolled postgraduate students who are involved in a wide variety of practice areas and; alimited budget and stock of physical resources.This is not an uncommon situation in small universities. However, we are neverthelessattempting - in what we think is a relatively innovative way - to provide each student with thebest postgraduate experience possible and produce world-class creative higher degreegraduates in a context of increasing government expectations for timely completion.Our first concern is that we should provide quality supervision in both the practice and exegesisareas. We have done this by sharing the supervision duties for each student between creativeartists with a recognised profile in each student’s area of practice, and a small team ofsupervisors who have had experience in the production of the scholarly theses and exegeses.In addition to ensuring that each student is receiving adequate supervisory attention, thisapproach has an added benefit for the Arts Academy in that it opens the way for additional staffmembers of the Academy to experience close engagement with postgraduate researchstudents which is an important step towards broadening and extending our community ofpractice. The other benefit for the Academy and its postgraduate students is that workingdirectly with experienced supervisors from other disciplines within the University, techniques,expectations and standards of postgraduate research are passed-on at an intimate level.Because the culture of research in the Arts Academy is still maturing, the contribution ofcreative arts to knowledge generation is still contested in some areas, and the legitimacy of ourwork in the eyes of the University is significantly enhanced by the input of these scholars.This is an important issue for us. One of our principal aims is to produce postgraduates whohave not only the opportunity to contribute to the development of their discipline in a scholarlyway, but also to be able to contribute to the research standing of the university in moretraditional areas. By encouraging our students to engage with issues that students in otherdisciplines are familiar with, albeit from a different epistemological stance, makes possibleimportant intellectual links between the Arts Academy and the other Faculties. A number of ourstudents, for example, have now been through the process of Ethics clearance in relation totheir research, and this has provided significant exposure of the intellectual basis of somecreative arts projects to the University community. In addition, some of our postgraduatestudents have joined with science students in extended field trips to the University’s arid landrural research centre, and have been able to demonstrate aspects of their research to studentsand staff.To support the development of the postgraduate student cohort’s scholarly exegeses, asupervisor from outside the Academy with a particular interest in research education has beeninvited to work with the two Arts Academy staff that have taken-on special responsibilities in thepostgraduate area. This core team of three supervisors meet regularly with all enrolled studentsfor formal supervision sessions, and provide a sounding board for issues to do with progress onthe creative work, to assist in the formulation of the research question, and to develop thewritten text that will accompany the examination exhibition. The cycle of meetings is usually nolonger than five weeks, and in this way all 25 currently enrolled students in the Academy obtaina reasonable frequency of contact with research staff. In this way, we have become satisfied4that the exegeses submitted from the Arts Academy as a precursor of the examination of theartwork, are of equivalent academic quality to all theses submitted by the University.Our second concern is that many of the postgraduates are enrolled as part-time students, andmany of them live and work a considerable distance from the University. This concern isconnected to the notion, implicit in the assumption of a ‘quality’ postgraduate experience, thatthe students are immersed in a situation where there is modelling and practice of the ways inwhich people act as research scholars. This is an ontological issue that we should not ignore,and is, we believe, a responsibility of the Academy that is implicitly taken on by the act ofenrolling a student in a postgraduate degree.To address this issue, we have decided to group the students into ‘progress levels’ and thesesmall groups are invited to attend the regular supervision sessions together. This arrangementhas been instituted as a way of increasing the intellectual and social contact between studentsand staff so that feelings of academic isolation, often noted by part-time postgraduate students,is minimised. We have deliberately avoided the strategy of running large group tutorials, whereall research students and staff come together on a regular basis, because we feel this does notadvantage the development of the student as a creative artist/researcher. The ambience oflarge groups can inhibit the flow of creative thought, reflection and communication that we areseeking to facilitate, and informal feedback to date from students who have experienced bothsystems, seem to justify this position.The notion of a ‘community of practice as an ontological strategy has guided this decision towork with small groups (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and we have been encouraged by the way inwhich much peripheral learning is apparently taking place as students observe discussions andexamples of each others’ work (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989). This approach is predicated onthe assumption that social interaction is a critical component of situated learning. In such agroup situation, a beginning researcher initially becomes peripherally involved in thediscussions and behaviours that characterise a creative learning community. As a result of thisinteraction with other members of the community during the supervision sessions, participantsgradually become recognised research students as they acquire knowledge at a self-paced rateat their own level of need.In this scheme, because we have the core team working with students on issues connected withconcept development and scholarly writing (Sillitoe & Crosling, 1999), the external or practicesupervisors are not diverted from their role as creative advisors. It is interesting to observe that,although the core team take full responsibility for the development of the exegesis, it is notuncommon for practice supervisors to come with their student to the regular meetings, and toengage in the discussions about selected passages of writing or aspects of the development ofthe conceptual basis of the work. This is an important aspect of the community of practice thatwe are trying to foster within the Academy, in that it also is a mechanism of expanding theavailable pool of staff that have exposure to the production of a scholarly exegesis.There is a further step that we have taken recently in the area of research education forstudents proceeding by the exegesis route. Whilst it is a requirement of the conditions of5examination that students in creative postgraduate degrees mount an exhibition of their work forthe examination, we are encouraging all students to exhibit in a separate commercial venue asa test of acceptance within the wider community. We are hoping, in the fullness of time, thatthese public exhibitions - properly critiqued - will become as recognised in the scholarly contextas refereed papers, and contribute to the academic reputation of the discipline and theuniversity.In addition, we are developing methods for the production of scholarly text publications basedupon the students’ work. We have an increasing number of successful higher degreecompletions and, as yet, we have not been able to fully exploit the innovative ideas andapproaches contained in them. Now that there are a growing number of journals that aredesigned for the communication of ideas connected to creative work, we intend to investigateways in which we can stimulate successful students to engage with this aspect ofcommunicating research. In this way we can not only help strengthen the Curriculum Vitae forthose students considering a career in arts education, but also make a positive statement aboutthe place of a creative art academy by making a pragmatic statement to the university about thecontribution to knowledge made by creative artists in the area of community in terms that arewidely recognised throughout academia.Finally, as the exegesis route to higher degrees gains maturity, we are beginning to makeexplicit links with the community in ways that have important applied social outcomes that are inaddition to the required knowledge contributions to the artist’s discipline. This has required us tomeet issues such as ethics clearance and insurance for research students that hitherto havebeen more in the bailiwick of traditional thesis areas, and has led us into a rich area ofinterdisciplinary research possibilities with other faculties, underscoring the important place ofthe Arts Academy within the traditional university system.Outcomes of this systemOne of the immediate outcomes of this approach that we can report is that the completion rateof postgraduate students in the Arts Academy has been quite remarkable. Since 1999, therehave been fifteen completed students (four doctorates and eleven masters), and a number ofthese have been passed at examination without any further work being required. In addition,there are twenty-five enrolled students who are, from informal feedback sources, very satisfiedwith the level of interaction with the Academy. Of these students, we anticipate that five willcomplete this year, contributing to the timely completion demands that are required of us. Thisrecord places the Arts Academy high on the University of Ballarat’s list of successful higherdegree completions.We are also pleased with the level of scholarship displayed in the exegeses that are beingsubmitted. In this regard, we have encouraged the students to view the exegesis itself asrepresenting their artistic abilities, and to be a stand-alone piece of scholarship. Students havereacted very positively to this suggestion and recent works have set new standards in imagereproduction, layout, and intellectual structure of argument and design.6A final aim of our initiative is to assist creative arts postgraduate students to more clearlyappreciate the nature of research work characteristic of other disciplines. By talking explicitly tostudents in terms of their epistemology and theoretical frameworks (Slife & Williams, 1995;Crotty, 1998), creative arts students are able to intellectually locate themselves in the researchsphere. In this way, we feel that our students, and a substantial section of the Universitygenerally, have come to appreciate why creative arts research is an important ‘alternative’knowledge-creation vector.7ReferencesBrown, J.S., Collins, A. & Duguid, S. (1989) ‘Situated Learning and the Culture of Learning’, EducationalResearcher, 18 (1), pp. 32-42.Crotty, M. (1998) The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the ResearchProcess, (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin).Illuminating the Exegesis (2003) University of Ballarat Arts Academy. Key refereed papers from thisnational one-day symposium were published in a special issue of the online journal TEXT at:http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/speciss/issue3/content.htmLave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press).Sillitoe, J.F. & Crosling, G. (1999) ‘Thesis Planning and Writing: a Structured Approach’, in Y. Ryan and O.Zuber-Skerritt, (eds.) Supervising Postgraduates from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds, (Buckingham:SHRE and Open University), pp.167-174.Slife, B.D. & Williams, R.N. (1995) What’s Behind the Research? Discovering the Hidden Assumptions inthe Behavioural Sciences, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).Snow, C.P. (1993) The Two Cultures, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Sullivan, G. (2005) Arts Practice as Research: Inquiry into the Visual Arts, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).Tashakkori, A. & Teddlie, C. (1998) Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and QuantitativeApproaches, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).

Underpinning practice-based creative research with quality supervision

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Underpinning practice-based creative research with quality supervision

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