|
Practice-based PhDs began in Australia in 1984, when the University of Wollongong and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) introduced Doctorates in Creative Writing. Graeme Harper obtained the first such degree in Australia from UTS. He is currently at the University of Plymouth in England, where he is very active in promoting practice-based research. Two current UTS professors, Theo van Leeuwen and Ernest Edmonds, were active earlier in such UK developments.
The first Polytechnic was formed in London in1880. When the concept was used for the significant expansion of such institutions in 1968, the goal was to add a service element to the mainstream of higher education. The knowledge that the Polytechnics taught and developed was to emphasis value in practice. Higher education was no longer to be seen as the centre of new understanding, of knowledge that described the world, but as the centre of new ways of doing things, of knowledge that improved our ability to act in the world.
When the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) drew up its regulations for the higher degrees to be awarded from Polytechnics, they included a critical clause, “The written thesis may be supplemented by material in other than written form”. This enabled a student to include an artefact, or the record of an artefact, as an integral part of their PhD submission. For example, when Susan Tebby submitted her PhD, “Patterns of Organisation in Constructed Art”, (Tebby, 1983), she put up an exhibition and included a full set of 35mm slides of its contents bound with the thesis. The examination was based on the artworks and the written thesis together. Practice-based PhDs today are most simply identified by the inclusion of such artefacts within the submission.
In Australia, the Australian Research Council has been funding research in creative practice and has entered a partnership with the Australian Council in which collaborative art/science projects are funded jointly. Similarly, in the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in its definition of research, states that “Creative output can be produced, or practice undertaken, as an integral part of a research process”.
The crucial point is that in certain disciplines knowledge can be partly advanced by means of practice. The idea that has developed was that a research student, for example, would take, as the subject of research the practice of their own discipline. The research programme would consist of a continual reflection upon that practice and on the resulting informing of practice. The examination would be based upon both the results of the practice and on a thesis concerning the reflections upon the process undertaken. Thus artefacts, for example a set of objects that had been designed and constructed, would form part of the candidate’s submission for the degree. The candidate would be expected to satisfy the examiners in all of the ways that are normal in a doctorate, such as demonstrating that they are well acquainted with the general field of knowledge in which their subject relates. It would be required that the thesis, as lodged in the Library, would include a permanent record of any artefacts submitted towards the examination. In this way, the practice-based PhD can be understood within the traditional context of the purely written PhD without any major revolution in education being required.
Studies have been made of practice-based research supervision that help to illuminate the process. For example, in order to chart the experiences of such students, qualitative interviews were undertaken with 50 research students at various UK universities. A paper based on those interviews examines one dimension of how students adapt to this kind of study, focusing on their conceptions of identity (Hockey, 2003)
|
