Practice-based Doctorates Research Articles

The importance of critical reflexivity in a professional business doctorate

ABSTRACT The focus of this study is to research the importance of critical reflectivity in practice-based management research. To achieve this, this paper seeks to demonstrate how candidates on the Doctor in Business Administration (DBA) programme at the University of Gloucestershire, have managed to integrate the dynamic tensions associated with ‘real life’ practice with their scholarly activities. It contends that rather than applying a Cartesian logic to education, the interplay of theory and practice can provide an essential component for studyat a doctoral level. The proposal here is that it is no longer necessary to maintain the thinking that scholarship and ‘real-life’ practice need to have a critical reflectivity ethos embedded into the candidate’s journey throughout the programme. Adopting a qualitative approach, 12 candidates at various stages of their professional doctorate journey were interviewed, including 5 at the submission or viva stage. To inform the interviews the research drew on Heidegger’s three physical placements of ‘ready to hand’, ‘present to us’ and ‘mitsein’ or ‘being with others’ to contextualise the candidates’ experiences. This was also viewed in terms of anticipatory resoluteness. This study also highlights that the DBA, being a practice-based doctorate, needs to embrace the importance of co-production.

Down the Brain Drain: Searching for Doctorateness in all the Wrong Places

This article reviews Perspectives on Research Assessment in Architecture, Music and the Arts: Discussing Doctorateness. Its editors’ aim is to establish a framework for applying the concept of “doctorateness” to the assessment of practice-based doctoral research in art and design fields. The book’s principal claim is that the purpose of practice-based doctorates is to uphold and maintain art and design practitioners’ values. I review each chapter and I evaluate the chain of inferences that lead from scoring the thesis to doctoral education’s purpose. I conclude that the authors’ argument undermines the research-teaching-study nexus.

What attracts arts industry professionals to undertake practice-based doctorates? Three Australian vignettes

ABSTRACT Artistic practice has a well-established presence in graduate research training. Extant writing on creative arts doctorates considers various issues, ranging from policy and process requirements to programme design, and the nature of the text itself. In the disciplinary domain of music, narrative accounts are often employed toexplore doctoral candidates’ decisions to pursue practice-based doctorates. This article builds on this approach by comparing and contrasting the experiences of three creative and performing arts doctoral candidates from Australia. It describes their attraction to the doctorate and their motives for undertaking doctoral study, with the aim of enhancing our understanding of arts industry professionals as graduate research candidates.

Modern challenges: the socio-political issues of introducing professional and practice in doctoral education in the emerging economy of Georgia

ABSTRACTThe development of applied-practice or professional doctorates has implications for the roles of not only academics and students but also the commercial drivers in the knowledge economy. The changes suggest that it is in the common good for developing economies, as well as benefiting both private economic and social capital. Universities worldwide are now offering doctoral degrees that relate more closely to the field of practice. The changing role of doctorates reflects the aim of universities to become more relevant, both economically and socially, yet this may not be in line with the objectives of the state. A principal-agent theory is used as the lens to explore the challenges faced in developing practice-based doctorates in Georgia, where governance is currently externalised and centralised and where the only doctorates recognised are academic. This form of external control may contribute to delay in adopting professional doctorates and any changes may challenge the entire system.

Making the familiar strange – a research pedagogy for practice

ABSTRACTThis paper engages with the pedagogical needs of researching professionals undertaking a professional or practice-based doctorate. It first undertakes a critical exploration of the literature and then explores how research supervision can address the emergent needs of the advanced practitioner as they undertake research at the doctoral level for the first time. Taking a practice theory perspective, the practitioner can be considered as approaching their programme already engaged with the knowledge objects that arise in their self-authored practice. The supervisor's role is to encourage the dissociation of the practitioner from both practice and object to allow them to critically engage with them – in effect to make the familiar strange. This critical engagement is encouraged through a learning framework that supports the development of knowledge beyond disciplinary constraints i.e. through the integration of knowledge from contributing perspectives on the object and with appropriate boundaries to the enquiry. The personal and relational aspects of the supervisory engagement must also be considered as well as the contribution of the practitioner's own experience of work. The engagement is facilitated by a high ‘quality’ supervisory relationship sufficiently robust to allow reflective dialogue on these issues.

The landscape of professional doctorate provision in English higher education institutions: Inconsistencies, tensions and unsustainability

This article reports findings from a recent research project, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which explored the current landscape of professional doctorate (PD) provision in English higher education institutions (HEIs) (Mellors-Bourne et al., 2016). Given the absence of a clear definition by the Quality Assurance Agency for England of the characteristics that distinguish PDs from practice-based doctorates and the doctor of philosophy, this paper makes a timely contribution through considering the inherent characteristics of PD programmes. The paper presents an overview of the state of play of PD programmes currently available in HEIs in England, highlighting how the proliferation of PD titles and programmes, and inconsistencies between the various programmes, has resulted in confusion about what PDs are, the contribution they make, and the value they add to professional practice. Consideration is given to the tensions created through the expansion in the number and types of PDs available, and the implications of these tensions with regard to the future sustainability of PD programmes in general and in relation to the professional doctorate in education (EdD) in particular.

Transdisciplinary qualities in practice doctorates

ABSTRACTDoctoral programmes in which candidates research their own practice can be characterised as having transdisciplinary (TD) qualities. While most of the emphasis in the literature and in policy on TD is on research in teams, we argue for an expansion of the scope in the conception and understanding of TD research to include the way it can be articulated and assessed in practice-led and practice-based doctorates. In this sense, it is worth exploring instances of doctoral programmes that potentially allow doctoral researchers to undertake projects that have TD qualities. In these doctoral projects, researchers draw from a variety of perspectives, for example from their work practices, the theorisation of those practices, experiential learning, multiple disciplinary knowledge and approaches as well as communications and networking with appropriate stakeholders. Drawing from previous scholarship of TD in other fields we analyse and evaluate the TD qualities of a particular doctoral programme. This analysis reveals a set of qualities recognised by the literature as TD and relevant to doctoral researchers: Researching collaboratively with stakeholders; Diversity of disciplinary expertise and assessment criteria; Integration of different methodologies; Situating the research in multiple contexts; Impact on the ‘situation’ through novel procedures or products; Ethics and the importance of trust; Reflection/reflexivity. The paper posits a convergence between practice doctorates and TD research and demonstrates how TD qualities help doctoral candidates to situate their research at the interface between academia and their professional work and develop projects that have creative and beneficial relevance for practice.

Resisting Best-Practice in Australian Practice-Based Jazz Doctorates

Recent research on practice-based doctorates in Australia has revealed an institutional preference for ‘theorised’ research approaches aimed at situating studies of practice within established academic paradigms. In this article we examine how the aim of communicating with artistic peers steers the research design and the production of text-based artefacts for a group of practice-based doctoral students working on jazz topics (n = 11) away from theorised approaches and towards what is commonly referred to as a ‘commentary’ approach. This finding reveals the extent to which the values of an artistic community can influence the scope of what is discussed within practice-based doctorates and highlights the need for ongoing discussion related to how such values might best interface with what institutions view as best-practice research frameworks.

Writing the Practice/Practise the Writing: Writing challenges and pedagogies for creative practice supervisors and researchers

There is now an increasing body of knowledge on creative practice-based doctorates especially in Australia and the United Kingdom. A particular focus in recent years has been on the written examinable component or exegesis, and a number of studies have provided important information about change and stability in the form and nature of the exegesis and its relationship to the creative project. However, we still know relatively little about the pedagogical practices that supervisors use to support these students’ development as scholarly writers, nor of how supervisors view ‘writing’ in relation to the creative practice components of the degree endeavour. This paper draws on data from a recent study of supervision in creative practice higher research degrees and it highlights the transformative nature of writing for the development of creative practice research scholars in the context of competing discourses on research writing. In contrast to institutional silencing of writing, the study relates numerous examples of effective writing-rich supervisory pedagogies illustrating how successful supervisors work with their students to bring their creative projects into articulation.

Why start a higher degree by research? An exploratory factor analysis of motivations to undertake doctoral studies

Despite the increasing numbers of candidates embarking on higher degrees by research (HDRs, e.g., PhD, professional doctorate, practice-based doctorate), we still have limited knowledge about why they are choosing this path. What are the factors that motivate students to embark on research degrees? Given that many of those who succeed in completing their doctorates will not go into academic positions, the motivations for choosing to undertake a research degree may not match the experience or outcomes (and hence, perhaps, contribute to incompletion rates). This article investigates the motivations of students in all faculties embarking on HDRs at an Australian university. A survey of 405 students was subjected to a factor analysis. Five factors emerged: family and friends, intrinsic motivation, lecturer influence, research experience, and career progression.

Change and stability: Examining the macrostructures of doctoral theses in the visual and performing arts

This article describes an investigation into the practice-based doctorate in the visual and performing arts, a genre that is still in the process of development. A key feature of these doctorates is that they comprise two components: a visual or performance component, and a written text which accompanies it which in some ways is similar to, but in others, is quite different from a traditional doctoral dissertation. This article focuses on the overall organizational patterns, or macrostructures of the texts that students submit as part of the examination in these areas of study, and how these patterns of organization are related to those found in more established examples of the doctoral dissertation genre in other areas of study. The study found that there is a range of organizational possibilities for the written text that is part of a doctoral submission in the visual and performing arts, each at different points on a continuum. Our study shows how the genre we examined has both the capacity for change, while remaining ‘stabilized for now’ in terms of its social action and purpose.

How to do things with words: textual typologies and doctoral writing

The paper reflects on modalities and typologies of writing practice within the fine art practice-based doctorate, exploring how looking at ways in which artists have engaged with writing as process, practice and visual/sonic form, can better inform the ways that doctoral writing itself may develop. Using tools developed through a close reading of Katie McLeod's work on typologies of doctoral writing, conducted in 1995, the paper generates a discussion about the relationship between art's methods and critical writing practice. It suggests that the practice-based doctoral project might be considered as a mutually constitutive one, combining both art making and poetics within an integrated whole, and arguing, with McLeod, that in the practice-based doctorate we are seeing the re-emergence of the artist as scholar, informed by practice and alive to art's investments in writing's digital, visual, performative and sonic forms in a period that theorists have dubbed the late age of print, an age in which the status, form and function of writing, and of print media, are being radically and productively challenged.

The relevance and consequences of academic literacies for pedagogy and research in practice-based postgraduate design

Research degrees are a recent phenomenon in the emergent academic design disciplines, and design practitioners and academics still debate their characteristics. Practice-based degrees may incorporate studio and other project work as part of the submission and the dissertation may exhibit variation in the visual and textual modes employed. The production of hybrid practice-based dissertation genres has consequences for research, supervision and writing pedagogies. The academic literacies approach stresses the need for students, faculty, and others to acknowledge the fundamentally underdetermined forms and conventions of dissertation writing and to work together for greater transparency in giving and getting feedback. If design fields wish to pursue the hybrid genres that practice-led project incorporating projects demand, a relevant writing pedagogy must be developed which looks beyond current conventions. Including evidence from an analysis of four recent practice-based doctorates with data from qualitative interviews with design educators, this paper argues for the relevance of academic literacies for dissertation writing and project work in design. In the final part of the paper I argue for the particular relevance of academic literacies for design research practice.

Visually mediating knowledge construction in project-based doctoral design research

Practice-based research projects in design often require students to construct contextual reviews of multiple fields. In this interdisciplinary territory of an emerging academic field, supervisors and students must work jointly to construct a mutually satisfactory outcome and avoid producing a body of dissonant voices. Knowledge and practice precedents must be actively constructed into a coherent map of the research terrain so that the project focus can be foregrounded. While the project-based component of practice-based doctorates is familiar creative territory for design students, balancing this with textual scholarship can lead to loss of focus and unstructured proliferation of sources. The use of two-dimensional visualization strategies, such as mind-mapping, can contribute to clarifying research positions and gaps but has limited capacity to dynamically integrate visual and textual sources. Digital visualization tools can facilitate the mutual student and supervisor organization of knowledge, exploit the visual literacy of design students and respond dynamically to project changes. This article shows how one visual tool may better mediate supervisory dialogues with students particularly in the context of practice-based doctorates of design incorporating project components. Following a review of existing research visualization strategies, I exemplify the potential of a hypertext tool to mediate the supervision and knowledge construction process with two narrative cases of student work.

Key writing challenges of practice-based doctorates

Building on the increasing interest within English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in postgraduate literacy development, this article examines the complexities of writing research at the academic/professional interface. It analyses two literature reviews by professional doctorate students at an Australian university who were writing research in their first language, English, about issues arising from their areas of professional practice. One of the student texts received a mostly negative evaluation from the disciplinary marker while the other received a mostly positive evaluation. Our analysis of the two texts identifies some key challenges of writing practice-based research, namely, framing a real-world problem as a research issue; incorporating one's own (and others’) professional knowledge; and using the literature to contextualise and theorise the issue under investigation. We propose that EAP-style pedagogies involving guided analysis of issues like these within research texts may benefit not only students writing in an L2 but also those struggling to write in their L1, and that more nuanced understandings of the textual expectations of practice-based research are needed so that student writers can learn to produce knowledge that will count within the academy.

The poetics of practice-based research writing

Practice-based research invites us to re-examine the relationship between our scholarly arguments and the modes of expression we adopt to communicate them. A choice of genre implies a commitment to the conventions of a particular discourse, its metaphors, analogies and rhetorical strategies. If different genres express (and, arguably, create) different views, what do ‘hybrid’ forms of writing—writing of uncertain or shifting provenance, such as the prose poem, the poet's critical essay, or the philosophical dialogue—express? What are the consequences of choosing a given mode of expression in research writing? What epistemic assumptions and implications does it carry? What is the relationship between ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ writing in practice-based research? This essay investigates how literary and philosophical genres of inquiry may be applied to research writing.1 Considering Richard Buchanan's concept of design argument in relation to the practice-based doctorate, this paper argues that the ‘hybrid’ text is concerned less with resolving problems on the basis of a theory, than with setting the terms by which the problem can be addressed through calculated performances and gestures. Hybrid literary genres, incorporating strategies from creative and critical practices, can thus help us frame the practice-based investigation, refine its methods, and give voice(s) to its research results, thereby equipping designers as well as researchers with important conceptual and representational tools.

Identity Change

For over a decade, practice-based research degrees in art and design have formed part of the United Kingdom research degree education portfolio, with a relatively rapid expansion in recent years. This route to the PhD still constitutes an innovative, and on occasion a disputed, form of research study and students embarking upon the practice-based doctorate find themselves in many ways undertaking pioneering work. To date there has been a dearth of empirical studies of the actual experiences of such students. This article, based upon qualitative interviews with 50 students based at 25 institutions, represents an attempt to begin to fill this lacuna. The article charts the biographical change which students undergo as they pursue their doctorates. It examines the ways in which they construct, maintain, and modify their identities whilst in the role of ‘creator/maker’, and seek to manage and combine the different modes of being required of a ‘creator’ and a researcher.