Communities, vaLues, Conventions and aCtionsof course, it is not the case that every practitioner- researcher feels dissatisfied with
the research that is produced, and its reception. When attempting to produce academic
research, practitioner- researchers often meet the academic conventions and produce
research that is regarded as being of the academic kind. it is therefore possible that
both the academic and the creative practice community may find the research that is
produced is satisfactory because the conventions have been met. however, owing to
their different value systems, compromises have had to be made along the way. This is
often done by adopting strategies that aim to bridge the two community values, either
by producing actions that are significant to the academic community, or by attributing
creative practice values to those academic actions.
When adopting community- bridging strategies, practitioner- researchers will, for
example, borrow traditional elements of academic research and apply them to value-
reflecting questions, or take their value- reflecting methods and attempt to modify
them so as to make them more acceptable to the academic community. so traditional
research elements are borrowed or new and modified elements are proposed. however
these are somewhat isolated strategies that compensate for what practitioner-
researchers perceive as the limitations of the existing models of research. The academic
community generally recognizes research produced by these practitioner- researchers
but the issues inherent to the creative practice community values will be more or less
compromised. We observe the practitioner- researcher adopting a variety of research
strategies in order to try to compensate for perceived shortcomings. a characteristic
of these strategies is that, while the research is accepted as being academically valid,
practice and research are kept separate.
The community bridging strategies all originate from the position that the
communities of practice and of academia are distinct and separate. many of the
previous attempts at conducting academic research in areas of creative practice did
not resolve the sense of dissatisfaction that we identify, hence the continuing debate.
This is because, although practitioner- researchers might produce academic research
and although they do consider the values of the creative practice community, they do
so through compromise. practitioner- researchers transit between the creative practice
community values and the academically valid models of research. The ongoing debate
about the nature of research in areas of creative practice continues because both
the community representing the interests of academic research, and the community
representing the interests of creative practice, see themselves as distinct, separate and
opposed. as a result, both communities are dissatisfied with the outcomes of academic
research in areas of creative practice because they fail, to some degree, to embody the
values of the parent communities. dissatisfaction arises from a feeling of compromise
on both sides.
in a coherent relationship between research model and community values, no
strategies are necessary for ensuring that the values are reflected and represented in the
research that is produced. When research models emerge from the community values,
in what we have described as a natural evolution, there is coherence between the
values and the research model. The research model that emerges in a natural evolution
is authentic, in the sense that it faithfully embodies the community values and leads
directly to appropriate actions. however, owing to the hasty academicization of the
creative practice community, the conditions have not facilitated the emergence of an