In this interview, Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos addresses, on the one hand, the process of transnationalisation of universities and the neoliberalisation of the classical model of the European university. On the other hand, he stresses that the recognition of difference and internal pluralism of science, which have pervaded the universities during the last decades, is now losing steam. However, he believes that the emergence of the Epistemologies of the South he proposes may contribute to the re-foundation of a new university more suited to the ethos of the 21st century, since the reconstruction or reinvention of confrontational politics requires an epistemological transformation. Therefore, he proposes a new, polyphonic university (or better, pluriversity) as this epistemological transformation unfolds. This means that the political alliances of the future will have an epistemological dimension characterized by an articulation or combination of different and differently relevant kinds of knowledge.
This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education focuses on innovative initiatives which are emerging in different Latin-American university contexts as well as a few other experiments in traditionally established universities. Sometimes these initiatives are newly created higher education institutions that are rooted inside indigenous regions, in other cases conventional universities start to "interculturalize" their student population, their teaching staff, or even their curricular contents and methods. Despite certain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin. After an interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Laura Selene Mateos Cortés, and Gunther Dietz, analyze the different ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceives "interculturalidad." The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also "expresses interculturality polyphonically from the Latin-American perspective" and reports "the nature and condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly intercultural contexts." Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico and the Intercultural University of Veracruz; in the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano explores the relationship between antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. She bases her article on the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic women. Christine D. Beaule and Benito Quintana’s article adds to the topic of this special issue with the argument of interdisciplinarity bringing together both an archaeological and anthropological perspectives of indigeneity to the higher education classroom. And finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural doctoral supervision.
Everyone who writes anything – even non-fiction! – knows you discover things as you go along. Writing is a heuristic. Writing history is no different. Yet senior-secondary and tertiary exponents of the teaching and learning of history are often strangely tongue-tied on the matter of writing and thinking as engines of discovery in historical studies in particular, and in the humanities and sciences in general. The quirks and customs of the actual research and writing practices underpinning knowledge of histories, whatever the genre, are less often modelled and explicitly discussed in advanced classrooms than the products of the historical research, the so-called history ‘content’. This essay re-considers the theory and practice of writing essays in general, and history essays in particular. Specific ways in which writing enables discoveries and ways in which it deepens interpretations are explored. Conclusions are derived for a better agenda, other than offering more content, for an advanced-level history education.
This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called "Life Writing." We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and ethical issues that arise from working with literary texts. Such an approach is not with risk. As we discuss in this article, life writing texts can often narrate difficult or traumatic material. However, we want to show how life writing, with its particular focus on actual lives and lived experience, creates a particularly conducive ethical, intellectual, and creative space for learning about and practicing writing.
This essay explains how research in Physics education by Eric Mazur, arguing from the pedagogic deficiencies of instruction through lectures, has been applied successfully in a thorough revision of two undergraduate courses in English, one on John Milton and another on William Shakespeare.
In this article, I explore the relationship between anti-globalization counter hegemonic discourse and Indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. Although seemingly unrelated, the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist women. Drawing on the central ideas developed in the book Indigenous Feminist Narratives: I/We: Wo(men) of An(Other) Way, I reflect on parallels and counterpoints between the voices from the global street movement, "other" epistemologies (identified hereafter), postcolonial theory, and contemporary Indigenous feminist theorization.
Our main objective is to analyze the different ways in which people involved in the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceive interculturality. This subsystem is still emerging and we refer to the specific case of Veracruz. We point out the discursive elements implied in the construction of definitions as well as the linguistic screens generated by actors and institutions. How are significations, translations and adaptations in intercultural education models changed when passing from a European "migrant" context to a Mexican indigenous one? Through an ethnography of intercultural discourses, we analyze the way in which Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural teachers of its campus Selvas produce alternative discourses, which are critical toward exogenous interculturality and focused on empowering local subaltern subjects.
While research has long been recognized as a high impact practice in undergraduate education, much of the scholarship on undergraduate research has focused on students in the final years of their degree. This article describes a study of the ability of first year students to undertake historical research in an introductory level course at a small liberal arts college. It discusses the challenges that first year student’s face in interpreting primary sources, working with multiple sources and crafting arguments based narratives about their findings. It also documents how a research paper assignment advances students’ historical thinking skills and contribute to the development of what the American Historical Association has termed the "core competencies" in the discipline.
Habermas and Arendt defend two contrasting accounts of discussion. While both accounts acknowledge the importance of knowledge as basis of discussion, Habermas emphasizes the aim of reasoned agreement and Arendt focuses on plural interpretative perspectives. I will explore the tension between the two accounts in order to clarify the phenomenon of discussion. In particular, I want to address the question whether the two accounts are incompatible or, rather, focus on different stages or practices of discussion that can be folded into each other.
High stakes assessments are commonly used at the end of secondary school to select students for higher education. However, growing concerns about the preparedness of new undergraduates for university study have led to an increased focus on the form of assessments used at upper secondary level. This study compared the structure and format of assessments used at upper secondary level (GCE A level qualifications), and the first year of undergraduate study of English literature in England. Greater diversity of assessment was found at university compared to A level, while there was little difference in the level of scaffolding and guidance provided in assessment materials. We conclude that it seems inevitable that some students will meet forms of assessment with which they are unfamiliar at university. Implications for the design of first-year undergraduate courses are discussed.
This study explored the transition to university as experienced by first-year students of English studies. The first year has been identified by existing research as a critical time for new students in terms of their persistence and success on their degree programme. However, there is a need for further research in the current UK higher education climate, especially within subject disciplines. Attempts to account for successful transition have investigated students’ social integration, the institutional environment, and theories of approaches to learning. In particular, the study drew on research into academic socialisation and academic literacies to examine students’ accounts of joining first year and their development of student identities. While describing anxieties and concerns about adjusting to the new practices and discourses of English literature at university level, students’ identification with their chosen subject appeared closely implicated in their engagement with university study and their academic identity formation. The study adopted a phenomenographic methodology suited to suggesting interpretative narratives of the experiences of small groups of participants.
Traditionally, assessment for university students in the humanities has been in an essay format, but this has changed extensively in the last decade. Assessments now may entail auditory and visual presentations, films, mind-maps, and other modes of communication. These formats are outside the established conventions of humanities and may be considered as creative works. Exploring definitions and research in the field of assessment of creativity, highlighting ways to explicitly assess the creative aspects of student work. An obligatory first year common unit titled "Cultural intelligence and capability" is examined as a model of how creative assessment can be used to extend engagement with subject material. Implications of considering creative aspects, in an explicit way, are reviewed. The underpinning argument is that in the current learning settings, creativity should be seen as an intrinsic part of appraisal criteria in the humanities as much as in the arts.
Knowledge deemed worthy of classification as ‘truth’ is not produced only in classic positivist research, or research recognised by the official state accreditation system, it is also produced by research–action, research + development, experimentation and systematisation. One of the most basic aspects of academic work is epistemological reflection on the justification of the research field and the method by which the hidden meaning of reality is discovered. This paper expresses interculturality polyphonically from the Latin American perspective; from the hopes shared with indigenous peoples and the poor; with social, religious and political activists and committed intellectuals; people who act and think honestly. A transversal theme of this text is the nature and condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly intercultural contexts. The discussion here is based on educational development projects, research and the author’s own experience of government and university management actions.
This article considers the way we talk about learning and teaching the humanities in higher education in the UK. By using the tools of the arts and humanities within the scholarship of learning and teaching, and examining a personal perspective, the author explores the transformational impact of French language learning and teaching. Close textual analysis of literary language learning memoirs highlight the sensual and physical effects of language learning that can remain muted in our everyday conversations. As a result, the author suggests that rather than lament the death of the humanities in 21st century higher education, learning and teaching a language offers a pedagogy of desire that embodies the transformation aspect of our disciplines, as we deal with the business of being human.
The idea of self-sufficiency resonates with feminist activists because the political thrust of the various movements for women’s rights—beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s plea for women’s access to education in her famous Vindication—hinged on finding sustainable solutions to the stranglehold that social, political, and economic institutions have on women’s lives. If the pivotal movement of feminism, in other words, is about increasing women’s sovereignty in a patriarchal world, the emerging "local/global" food movements provide a dynamic opportunity to understand how the personal can be refashioned into political action. The point of this essay is thus twofold: first, to show that food literature is an excellent medium to teach transnational feminist theories and practices; and second, to offer some of our strategies for feminist civic engagement through reclaiming the idea of "the personal is political."
How do artists and designers teaching in universities communicate creative practise as they teach art/design? There is much discussion about the ‘mystery’ of creativity, but little understanding of how teaching occurs in creative contexts. Understanding this topic better will develop greater knowledge within the academy of how art and design is communicated by the creative practitioners who teach it, and could benefit other academic disciplines. In this article, I draw on data from a recent Australian study with artist/designer-academics. It provides rich qualitative data to explore in detail how artists and designers teaching in universities communicate creative practise as they teach art/design. Tacit and embodied knowledge theories are used to provide frameworks for explaining this phenomenon. I argue that artist/designer-academics embody their creative practises and communicate these through teaching in both tacit and explicit forms, and that they do this through modelling knowledge, skills and practise.
This article describes, discusses and reflects on a teaching and learning experiment in a first year BA course. Students were led out of the lecture room to a different space, the New Place Theatre. While this move out of the usual teaching space was appropriate for the text being studied, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the strategy aimed to develop students’ grasp of a critical concept we had identified as troublesome to students who had encountered it in the past: subjective interpretation. For us the concept of subjective interpretation shared the transformative and integrative, as well as the troublesome, characteristics of ‘threshold concepts’. According to threshold concept theory, threshold concepts are critical points where students may get ‘stuck’ before making ‘learning leaps’ as they journey towards a ‘new conceptual space and enter ... a postliminal state in which both the learner and the learning are transformed’ (
The severity of the global economic crisis has put the spotlight firmly on measuring academic and research performance and productivity and assessing its contribution, value, impact and benefit. While, traditionally, research output and impact were measured by peer-publications and citations, there is increased emphasis on a ‘market-driven approach’, which favours the bio-, medical and technological sciences, and has helped reinforce a disciplinary hierarchy in which arts and humanities research has struggled for attention. This article charts the changing policy environment across Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway. It draws on evidence from the HERAVALUE project that studied how different stakeholders value arts and humanities research; almost 100 interviews were conducted with representatives from the academy, policymakers and civil society in these three countries. Although the arts and culture have played a distinctive nation-forming role, and continue to do so, each country has adopted very different policy responses towards arts and humanities research.
Recent policy discourse suggests that arts and humanities research is seen as being less useful to society than other disciplines, notably in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The paper explores how this assumption’s construction has been built and whether it is based upon an unfair prejudice: we argue for a prima facie case to answer in assuming that arts and humanities research’s lower societal value. We identify a set of claims circulating in policy circles regarding science, technology, engineering and mathematics research and arts and humanities research’s differences. We find two groups: arts and humanities research is less useful than science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and arts and humanities research is merely differently useful. We argue that empirical analysis is necessary to disentangle which ones are true to assess whether policy-making is being based on rational and evidence-based claims. We argue that debates about public research value should recognise that humanities have different (but equally valid) kinds of societal value.
Arts and humanities research appears to have a problem when it comes to making an argument that it matters to society. Despite widespread efforts within and beyond the field to document how arts and humanities research creates social value, these arguments have had little traction within public policy debates. The paper argues that other disciplines have been able to mobilise an ‘investment logic’, based on a more nuanced model of how knowledge creates value, showing how investing in small research projects drives economic growth, highlighting, for instance, the direct links between universities, spin-offs, the biotech sector and large pharmaceutical firms. If one looks at arts and humanities research through this lens, it is possible to find examples of how individual pieces of arts and humanities research are translated upwards through first-order users, through networks, to create societal improvements: it is therefore possible to meaningfully argue for arts and humanities research driving societal value creation. The paper concludes by reflecting on how arts and humanities research might apply this wider model of research valorisation to better convey its societal benefits in contemporary science policy discussions.
Funding organisations are increasingly asking academics to show evidence of the economic and social value generated by their research. These requests have often been associated with the emergence of a so-called ‘new social contract for research’ and are related to the implementation of new research evaluation systems. Although the research evaluation rhetoric is similar across countries and organisations, in practice evaluation can fulfil very different purposes. Additionally, the assessment of the public value of research poses different challenges depending on the academic field under analysis. This paper distinguishes three main research evaluation goals: to inform the distribution of public resources among competing objectives or performers, to help improve the implementation of policies and programmes, and to control the use of public funds. It then argues that assessing the value of research in the arts and humanities calls for a research methodology capable of providing a fine-grained understanding of the variety of, often diffuse, ways in which arts and humanities research can generate value. The methods that we need to do this are better suited to fulfil the improvement goal of evaluation, and require a ‘formative’ approach to evaluation supporting the social engagement of academic researchers.
This article argues that innovation may constitute a useful perspective on the link between society and arts and humanities research. Innovation is here seen as ‘something new put into practical use’, and there are two reasons why it can be relevant for humanities. First, there has been an expansion of what innovation refers to; it is now commonly used for non-economic change processes in public, private and non-profit organisations. Second, arts and humanities are not unique in their contribution to innovation: good teaching, research, dissemination and external relations are the central contributions for all university disciplines. But this does not mean that it is easy to promote innovation at universities in general and in arts and humanities in particular. Through examples from a historical case study at the University of Oslo, different tensions are analysed related to indicators, infrastructure, teaching versus research and quality. All these need to be handled in such a way as to avoid fruitless conflicts, misunderstandings and poorly designed policies and university strategies.
No matter what the national context, the question of how to understand the impact of government programmes, particularly in terms of value for money, has emerged as a complex problem to be solved by social scientific management. This article engages with these trends in two ways. It focuses on the UK to understand how these tools and technologies are used for valuing objects and practices. By showing the rationality for using these techniques for understanding culture, it creates a link between studies of cultural policy and broader questions facing the arts and humanities. The article’s second contribution is to our understanding of the role and function of arts and humanities by showing, in the British example, how a true understanding of the value of culture is impossible without the disciplines and fields that are currently peripheral to both government social science and, more broadly, higher education in the UK.
The wider context of arts and humanities education in the UK has demanded that university teachers and administrators focus on ‘end points’. Increased emphasis on the generic and transferable skills attained through arts and humanities programmes, along with intense concern to raise students’ reported levels of satisfaction, do not necessarily help university teachers to make the best use of the expanding body of research on how students actually learn from assessment and feedback. This article focuses not on the final-year students, whose views are increasingly solicited in satisfaction surveys, but on two cohorts of first-year History students as they write their first essays and have their first experiences of feedback in a research-intensive institution. The article explores at a micro-level some of the factors which earlier research has identified as critical to the development of assessment and feedback practices which are conducive to students’ self-regulation and future learning.
This article presents the research context for a 2013 investigation of how discipline of study at undergraduate level contributes to the development of generic problem solving skills. Inspired by a number of recent higher education policy developments in Ireland, it takes a different approach to the utility debate that seems to plague discussions of the arts and humanities as disciplines of study, looking into the economic and policy research underpinning what we know about the outcomes that can be expected from these courses of study, as well as the very small amount of evidence for medium to long term success in career formation. As might be expected, it exposes significant gaps between the research evidence for utility, the opinions of employer representatives and the policy positions taken, suggesting that common perceptions of all disciplines require a reevaluation.
Questions around the value of the arts and humanities to the contemporary world and the benefits they are expected to bring to the society that supports them through funding have assumed an increased centrality within a number of disciplines, not limited to humanities scholarship. Especially problematic, yet crucial, is the issue of the measurement of such public value. This article takes as a starting point a discussion of the ‘cultural value debate’ as it has developed within British cultural policy: here, the discussion of ‘value’ has been inextricably linked to the challenge of ‘making the case’ for the arts and for public cultural funding. The paper discusses the problems with the persisting predominance of economics in shaping current approaches to framing articulations of ‘value’ in the policy-making context. It concludes with a plea for a collaborative effort to resist the economic doxa, and to reclaim and reinvent the impact agenda as a route towards the establishment of new public humanities.
This article gives Michael Agar’s email responses to two questions put by Gavin Melles: "What are your thoughts on the advantages and dangers of developments in applied anthropology for ethnographic and anthropology practice?" and "What are your impressions of the potential and actual use of ethnography in design?" The responses open further questions regarding the assumptions involved in the methodology and application of design research, and the scope of "design" as a dynamic category extending beyond the production of objects for end-users to making change in social and environmental systems.
As an artist, designer and cultural historian, my work is concerned with integrating thought with material creativity. By relating science to methodology and learning strategies, somatic, experiential awareness comes to the fore. New scientific evidence about our neural network enables us to return to the body of experience we already have; learning to respect the understanding that physical actions engender in the mind, fulfilling our potential by acknowledging the sensory, emotional and rational parts of ourselves. The apparent chaos of the senses, avoided for so long in the rational sciences, is essential for growth, creativity and knowledge. The overarching dependence on analytic thought over felt experience denies its essential relationship to growth, creativity and knowledge, with profound implications for our society. By taking the vessel or container as a research tool and merging David Kolb’s experiential learning diagram with neuron development, the importance of valuing all routes to knowledge can be demonstrated.
The overlap between the visual and textual in practice research provides an opportunity to explore ways of presenting knowledge through performance writing. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a performance writing practice can be incorporated into and shape research writing. This text uses descriptions of Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documentation, medical–historical documents and the deconstruction thereof to create a piece that demonstrates performance writing as a means to bridging practice research and research writing.
This paper examines the dynamic interplay between practice and theory in practice-led research in the visual arts. Building on recent debate around the issue and following appropriately rigorous models, the importance of locating a suitable methodology to adequately reflect the integrated process of research practice in written as well as visual form is underlined. Exploring the role of the embodied practitioner and issues of subjectivity and description, I propose that the adoption of a performative writing strategy that reflects both the content and context of the enquiry can be a productive move and put forward alternative routes and references that might practically assist achievement of just such an aim. Critical references that can support such a framework are also suggested and examples of alternative writing strategies that might help underpin alternative dissemination frameworks indicated.
This paper analyses the effect of Christopher Frayling’s categorisation of artistic research ‘research into art and design, research through art and design and research for art and design’ on the debate surrounding the efficacy of studio-based artistic research as being valid within the university. James Elkins describes this as the ‘the incommensurability of studio art production and university life’. Through an exploration of the positive and negative responses to Frayling this paper explores the influence that these initial definitions have come to have on framing the scope of the debate. The paper presents a range of responses and analyses them; it focuses especially on the alternative frameworks that have been suggested and examines why they have so far not created a coherent and uncontested framework for practice-led research in the art and design field especially in relation to fine art.
This article asserts that the terms ‘practice-led’ and ‘practice-based’ in the context of Art and Design doctoral research are overly simplistic and maintain oppositional thinking by privileging ‘practice’ in generating knowledge. It argues instead for theory and practice as interrelated discourses and art practice research as complex, dialogical and comprising a heterogeneous spatiality. Building on my own ‘writing//painting’ methodological approach which utilises l’écriture féminine, this article highlights the importance of the specificity of individual methodological approaches and the need for a more common framework of articulation so that these approaches are accessible throughout the wider sphere of Art and Design.
Practice as research and performance as research are methods that have developed significantly over the past decade and have subsequently caused debate within the creative arts industry and in university culture. During a research seminar at Goldsmiths University in 2011, Professor Dan Rebellato proposed the question: ‘What if there is no such thing as practice as research?’ In an attempt to unpack the connotations of the term, Rebellato further provoked, ‘Can we learn from an artwork in the way we can learn from an academic book?’ This paper is a systematic response to some of the key arguments surrounding this dialogue, as well an investigation as to how practice or performance as research may function in a performing arts context as research degree level.
This paper combines two psychological approaches to art to theorise a both subjective and cultural methodology for practice-based arts research. The first psychoanalytical approach will follow the work of Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis, considering the role of the artist in order to assess their work in relation to society from an engaged position. The second approach will be Žižek’s Lacanian cultural theory, focusing on exposing the drives of the subjective individual in relation to their social condition. The combination of these theories allows new approaches for cultural analysis of art to emerge, taking into account the subjectivity necessary for using art to unveil what cannot be expressed in theory alone. This can be used to formulate a two-stage practice-based methodology for research, from both sides of the ‘couch’, in critically analysing the functions of consciousness involved at both the subjective and cultural levels of contemporary art.
The paper proposes the activity of drawing as a methodological strategy within a university research context. It is illustrated with examples from one of the authors’ (Roberts) practice-based PhD research. The paper argues that drawing as a research method can be validated in a manner akin to the more established research methods associated with the range of research paradigms outlined in Denzin and Lincoln’s Handbook of Qualitative Research. It is proposed that visual research methods are unique in their ability to produce experiential knowledge that can be shared through visual media but not easily articulated through language. The paper then argues that drawing’s contribution as a visual research strategy has a more holistic and far-reaching potential within the university than other qualitative and quantitative research methods. In addition, visual research outputs operate as components of findings and conclusive evidence in the form of experiential knowledge that can enrich and extend language-based cognitive knowledge.
This paper examines some parallels and differences in pursuing practice-based research in art or architecture. Using a series of different headlines and examples, I examine the potential of working between art and architecture, which I argue could generate new, hybridised methodologies of practice through interrogating the possibilities of art/architecture beyond the institution. Within the familiarity of the everyday lives the ‘intuitive’ knowledge that art embodies, and this paper further seeks to ask what this can contribute to debates around practice-led research in art and architecture, recognising ‘the art aspects of design’. Through discussing the role of collaboration, intuition and in-betweenness, I hope to ask questions about the role of the researcher in the ‘becoming and disappearing’ of practice-based research.
This paper discusses the problematic category of ‘things known’ to be the masculine hegemony (‘His House’) through which we experience reality, and the challenging situation of inhabiting dichotomous frameworks of knowledge. Methods are defined within practice in work that is process led, that investigate the relationship between thought, action and interpretation, in order to interrogate dichotomous boundaries of knowledge. Through a practice-based inquiry a shift is recognized from methods that bind creative thinking to the dichotomy of concept to object. Acts of experimentation are employed as a method of action, or ‘flitting’, a ‘hybridised’ method of continuous action, between text, form, reflection, object, experience and image, drawn from subjective perception, as a means to interrogate and intervene within the existing structures of knowledge.
The attempt to record visual experience has been of central importance to many artists throughout the history of art. Vision itself is made up of many processes, both psychological and physiological, and is still only partially understood. This paper presents research into an aspect of visual experience descried as ‘close-up double vision’, which has been directly informed by the artwork of the Swansea born artist Evan Walters. Close-up double vision occurs when an object is seen extremely close to a viewer whose eyes are not both fused on the object concerned, creating a doubling effect in the visual field. Walters termed this doubling effect caused by lack of binocular fusion ‘double vision’ and spent much of the latter part of his career trying to record it. This paper briefly introduces Walters’ experiments in double vision and outlines current research that attempts to record this aspect of visual experience in artworks.
This paper examines the positioning of art practice as a mode of research through various legitimising practices. While frequently fruitful, the imperative to make art justify itself as a form of research in order to achieve legitimacy allows that in art which does not engage in negative dialectics to slip from view. The possibility of the kind of rigorous thinking that is called for in art-as-research is a manner of recognition not based on established methods, a recognition that offers little in the way of certifiable knowledge. What art-as-research can give, however, is a manner of thinking and doing that finds legitimacy in strict fidelity to the specific contours of the work. The question is not whether or how artists can justify this as research, but whether the university is prepared to recognise research not grounded in established methodological practices, but rather in the abyss of its own groundless affirmation.
This article reflects critically on ‘The Social Dynamics of Art Research: Contemporary Photography in Belfast’, an engaged research project conducted with photographers, community activists, academics and visual artists in Belfast. Through a critical examination of the project’s theoretical architecture and methodological framework this paper explores some of the emerging questions and challenges implicated in a research strategy of convocation and collaborative research production.
The research assessment framework is an unstable reality in many countries. While few would disagree that there is a need to measure and reward research excellence, there has been little investigation of how assessment mechanisms relate to knowledge itself. With a focus on the arts and humanities and writing from an Australian perspective, this paper draws together discussions of research assessment frameworks and forms of knowledge to consider what can and cannot be measured, and what we might gain from (or lose from not) measuring these things. We argue that the focus on measurable outputs risks a culture that favours effective packages of knowledge at the same time as ignoring the immeasurable, or hidden elements of research and scholarship – elements that Aristotle considered to underpin scholarship itself.
This article explores the connection between dance and politics through reflection on the process of writing a thesis about those two fields. Similarities and differences in the educational and disciplinary processes of academic practice and dance training are brought out, while focusing on the technique developed by Martha Graham: in particular the concepts of contraction and release are discussed in terms of their significance for training in academic practice in the humanities. Thinking of dance as a critically reflective practice is argued to have significant possibilities for our conception of a different way of doing politics while focusing on human rights as an affirmative concept.
This article introduces a novel approach to pedagogy within an art school in the UK HE sector, based upon a synthesis of perception theory and communication theory. It is argued that art students’ drawing is empowered by strategies of teaching informed by aspects of James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception relevant to an understanding of the variety of information contained in the structure of light. Three types of perceivable information are identified: the distal, the haptic, and the proximal, described as channels of vision, and illustrated with examples of the author’s drawings. Aspects of Roman Jakobson’s communication theory are introduced, and both theorists’ insights are amalgamated in a systemic-functional semiotic matrix describing the domain of drawing derived from Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional semiotic model for language. The matrix has informed the design of a curriculum for drawing, and a project from this curriculum is presented and illustrated with students’ drawings.
In light of recent attempts to defend the role of the arts in education against the effects of policies based on utilitarian principles, this paper examines the arts educational writings and practical projects of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) at Santiniketan in West Bengal, showing how they were motivated by a Romantic and Upanishadic philosophy centred on the anti-utilitarian concept of ‘surplus’. While the development of Santiniketan’s present arts and music departments away from Tagore’s original ideals is acknowledged and traced, the paper argues that Tagore’s aesthetic and educational philosophy still contains much to challenge us. In many ways, his thought can be seen as more compatible with progressive and liberal arts education than the ideology of high modernism that developed at the same period in Europe.
This essay explores three orientations to knowledge: the scholar, the intellectual, and the bricoleur. It argues that although the scholar and the intellectual are tied closely to the Liberal Arts and Humanities and dominate academic public relations discourse, both students and faculty increasingly use the practice of bricolage to gather and organize information. Associated with postmodernity, bricolage is a functional response to both the increasing velocities of information flows and the breakdown of cultural hierarchies. Bricolage, however, contradicts the scholarly tradition and the prevailing discourses of rigor and accountability. This essay argues that academia responds to this shift by focusing on literacies, the skills necessary to engage with the techno-information landscape, and by implementing quality management strategies that cordon off salient disciplinary knowledge sets, prescribe efficient pedagogies, and then apply assessment matrices. It also considers how the Digital Humanities engage with these orientations.
Lee Shulman’s concept of signature pedagogies in the professions has captured the imagination of many researchers and educators. In higher education, the concept has been extended to teaching in particular disciplines, and it is here argued that the concept of signature pedagogy can be usefully extended to an influential teaching system in the humanities: the Oxford tutorial. Some of the specific aspects of the tutorial system, and the habits of teaching and learning that tutors and students develop are described; and some of the limitations of the term ‘signature pedagogy’ for this case are also identified. The term ‘powerful pedagogy’ is proposed as a useful extension of ‘signature pedagogy’, to identify ambivalent features of influential teaching systems.
This paper presents an examination of the learning of pre-service Visual Arts teachers through dialogic pedagogy. Dialogic education gives students the power to speak in their own voices, and through the interactions which take place between them, relationships, identities and ideologies are constructed. The dialogic process examined in this paper was conducted prior to the teaching of concepts relating to art. It involved pairs of students, with one student bringing and describing his/her favourite artwork and the other responding. The data revealed that the participants learned in an interactive way, and through self-reflection and a process of critical thinking. Dialogic pedagogy favours the development of interpersonal relationships; a supportive learning environment which enhances students’ understanding is built up. After use of dialogic pedagogy for over three years in teaching this course the scope of the students’ knowledge was extended and they had become more motivated to learn.
A historic dialectic exists between the beautiful and the bestial. The bestial destroys the beautiful, but in a bloody miracle, the beautiful emerges from the womb of the bestial, the ‘terrible beauty’ of which the poet W. B. Yeats wrote. The liberal arts, so often thought to dwell in a remote ivory tower, embody this dialectic. Wars and disasters have spurred their evolution. Even more important, the liberal arts are at once the dialectic's most energetic and sensitive explorers. Shakespeare’s gory tragedy about war and warriors, Macbeth, is a springboard for such explorations, dramatizing a dialectic between war and love, destruction and redemption, savagery and poetry. We bathe in reeking wounds. Because of their diversity, liberal artisans, practitioners of the liberal arts, are now uniquely prepared to engage with this dialectic. They can also inoculate us against the diseases of the allure of war, blood lust, and propaganda.
The inclusion of cultural and contextual approaches in the study of literature has long been accepted as imperative in the literature classroom, fostering, as it does, the sensitization of students to diverse worldviews. This article aims to explore the way in which literature could affect students' preconceived notions of communities and people by using a specific context within the Middle East, that of the Indian community in Oman. The historical relationship between Oman and India is a complex one, including as it does a little-known historical narrative and a contemporary reality which includes stereotypes of the Indian community. Using the example of a classroom experience, this study looks into the ways in which literary texts, when dealt with in a contextual manner, afford a critical understanding of communities and succeed in correcting misconceptions by allowing for a dynamic relationship between two groups of people whose encounters with each other become layered and complex.
What does it mean to find echoes of an innovatory moment in the past, or a discipline’s cutting edge in another’s worn down tool, or people in different fields quite unknown to one another following a similar intellectual trajectory over the same three or four years? A short case study of what looks uncannily like ‘independent invention’ is prefaced by reflections on replicatory practice in the social sciences. Some US sociological theorizing on the workings of fractal distinctions within disciplines, specifically across many foundational arguments in social science, finds a counterpart in UK anthropological theorizing on scale and replication in social phenomena at large. The conjunction is amusing; it could well be instructive. In any event, there is a challenge here to comparisons across disciplines.
Despite reading being recognized as a core academic skill, surprisingly little research has been undertaken into university lecture reading requirements. This article reports on the trial and evaluation of a minimalist reading model developed for students in arts and education subjects. Comprising annotated extracts from full texts ‘linked’ wherever possible via hypertext mark-up language to glossaries, e-dictionaries and online translation services, the minimalist model was intended to rethink pre-lecture reading requirements and conventional approaches to designing reading lists at the tertiary level. Findings indicate that while students are generally receptive to the redesign of conventional approaches to pre-lecture reading in the disciplines sampled, several participants expressed reservations about the model. The research provides insights into the study mores of the contemporary university student and re-emphasizes the need to ensure the diversity and complexity of the student cohort is catered for by educators and university managers as far as practicable.
This article discusses the effectiveness of using an approach based on a virtual learning environment (VLE) to enhance the close-reading skills of first-year English undergraduates. The first two sections explore the practical and theoretical issues involved in adopting such an approach; the third describes the design and functions of a VLE close-reading resource designed for this purpose; and the fourth and fifth elucidate the methodology and findings of a two-year research project which aimed to evaluate the resource’s effectiveness. Analysis of the findings shows: first, that student usage of the resource is significantly enhanced by tutor recommendation; second, that student usage strategies are highly instrumental (i.e. that students disproportionately choose texts likely to feature in the end-of-year exam); and third, that the expansion of the number of particular kinds of worked examples would increase the usefulness of the resource. The implications of these findings for use of the VLE resource are discussed.