In this chapter I pursue the effects for knowledge, pedagogy and learning of practice led research in art and design education. I examine how postgraduate students of art, design and museology at the Institute of Education, University of London, explore and critically engage with the implications of art as a situated research practice. In particular, I foreground the complexities and antinomies surrounding methodology when students negotiate the practice of making in a studio context that encourages them to analyse their subject identities as teachers/lecturers, students, artists, academics and researchers. The expectation of academe and the position which language (written, spoken and visual) occupies is central to the formation of these identities, negotiations and dialogues. I will demonstrate, through discussion of work produced by students, that the traditional division between engagements with art making as a ‘sensory experience’ and with reading, writing and research as ‘rational activities’, presents a false dichotomy that needs to be reappraised in the debates surrounding practice-led research and its potential for pedagogy
