foundationscan find indicators of these changes such as the incorporation of arts schools into
universities, the funding made available through research councils which also broaden
their remit into practice, availability of doctorates, etc. For example, in the uK the
majority of art schools were located in polytechnics as part of the vocational education
sector. in 1992 the polytechnics were legally incorporated as universities, which had
the immediate effect of increasing both the opportunity and the competitive necessity
to compare the creative and performing arts with all other university-based subjects.
The new breed of practitioner- researcher had to compete for resources, and were also
now in an academic environment in which new levels of study were available. since
the highest level of qualification in universities is the phd, this, rather than the ma,
became the target terminal award. But the phd is a research degree and therefore
somewhat different in its aims and objectives from the more professional oriented
degrees such as the Ba or ma (Chapter 1).
There are some disciplines that have conducted academic research for longer than
others, and have therefore helped to shape the notion of what constitutes academic
research. When we look back at the period of academicization, for example through
the discipline of chemical engineering, it may seem that there was always a harmonious
relationship between academics’ values and their research activities. The natural
evolutionary situation is that the values of an academic community determine the
research activity that the community adopts and that, therefore, they develop coherently.
This is not, however, the case of disciplines such as the creative and performing arts,
which are being hastily academicized owing to having been pushed into the academy.
in response to the immediate call for an infrastructure for knowledge production, we
have claimed that these disciplines remedially built a collage from the resources in other
areas. academic resources were only superficially modified in order to accommodate
the production of the creative practice community (Biggs and Büchler 2011). To some
extent this is understandable because they did not already have research models that
were both coherent with their values and met their newfound academic needs.
if we look for how professional values are transmitted, we find that the atelier
model has been a persistent teaching model in the creative and performing arts. in this
model the lecturers in advanced studies in the institutions are also active professional
practitioners, and as a result the student is exposed to the values of the professional
community. until recent times it has proven to be a very successful educational
model, but one which was not primarily focused on academic values. however, the
contemporary environment is changing substantially in response to the academicization
of these formerly vocational subjects. at a practical level, practitioner- researchers now
find themselves having been professionally trained for one type of activity but asked
to perform another. The type of training that they have hitherto received regarding
research has been pragmatically driven, and has consisted in their ability to find out
what they need to know about a subject to enable them to operate within that subject
as ‘guest workers’. however this type of research is not academic research. as we have
already said, this type of research is finding out something that one does not know,
whereas academic research is finding out what nobody knows. The former type of
research has an important place in the creative practice community as part of a cultural
network of the production and consumption of experiences. The latter kind of research
is quite different, and traditionally consists of the production of journal articles, books,