Practice-based Research Approach Research Articles

Exploring the Application of Multiple Contradictory Space Elements and Principles of M.C. Escher

M.C. Escher, a renowned graphic artist, merged art and science to produce seemingly ‘unreasonable’ contradictory spaces that expand our vision into an infinite loop. Numerous designs have been influenced by his works. However, findings from the literature reveal that most adapt only a single contradictory space element or principle, while few explore more intriguing visual effects by incorporating multiple elements and principles. This study aims to explore the application of multiple Escher’s contradictory space elements through creative practice. A two-phase practice-based research approach was used. A graphic illustration was created in the first phase and was used as a stimulus in the second phase for semi-structured interviews with five conveniently selected individuals to assess their views on works integrating contradictory spatial elements and principles. The findings revealed contrasting opinions: while visitors found the work stimulating, triggering associations with the depicted subjects’ symbolic meanings and producing exciting spatial effects, they also perceived a lack of compositional order. While the creative practice and outcome could provide valuable references for other creative practitioners, the qualitative findings may inspire future research in related areas.

Reducing endocrine metabolic disease risk in adults with chronic spinal cord injury: strategic activities conducted by the Ontario-Quebec RIISC team

Purpose The Rehabilitation Interventions for Individuals with a Spinal Cord Injury in the Community (RIISC) team aimed to develop and evaluate innovative rehabilitation interventions to identify endocrine metabolic disease (EMD) risk, intending to reduce the frequency and severity of EMD related morbidity and mortality among adults living with chronic spinal cord injury or disease (SCI/D). Materials and Methods An interprovincial team from Ontario and Quebec reviewed available EMD literature and evidence syntheses and completed an inventory of health services, policies and practices in SCI/D care. The review outcomes were combined with expert opinion to create an EMD risk model to inform health service transformation. Results EMD risk and mortality are highly prevalent among adults with chronic SCI/D. In stark contrast, few rehabilitation interventions target EMD outcomes. The modelled solution proposes: 1) abandoning single-disease paradigms and examining a holistic perspective of the individual’s EMD risk, and 2) developing and disseminating practice-based research approaches in outpatient community settings. Conclusions RIISC model adoption could accelerate EMD care optimization, and ultimately inform the design of large-scale longitudinal pragmatic trials likely to improve health outcomes. Linking the RIISC team activities to economic evaluations and policy deliverables will strengthen the relevance and impact among policymakers, health care providers and patients.

Design Thinking in Education: Adding Collaboration, Uncertainty, Phronesis and Fairydust to Curriculum Design

We exist in an age of supercomplexity with policy and strategies both impacting and restricting creative curriculum development and participatory classroom practices particularly in Higher Education (HE). As academic developers who have also taught undergraduate programmes we inhabit liminal space - both enacting and subject to policy - both professing and subverting practice. In this paper we outline how we have engaged in human centred curriculum design ourselves. Typically curriculum evaluation and development processes are presented to our staff-as-students as something far removed from design thinking (DT). Curriculum design emphasises thorough thinking, it is slow-paced, and continuously evaluated. DT requires trust and collaboration, open sharing of diverse and often contradicting ideas, rapid prototyping - a non-judgemental space that will help ideas develop and grow, playing with initiatives that might not work. DT encourages experimentation. We used a collaborative Practice-Based Research (PBR) approach to explore our processes to reveal how DT can be a valuable part of a more fast-paced, urgent, creative and human centred curriculum design.

Practice-Based Pedagogies for Counter-Memorial Performance: Teaching to Address and Shift “Plantation Energy”

This article discusses History, Memory, Performance, Place: Activating Davidson’s Submerged Histories, a practice-based course I developed and taught in spring 2020 and spring 2021 at Davidson College, a small liberal arts college twenty miles north of Charlotte, NC, established in 1837 by white slave owners. Drawing together dance, performance studies, and Black studies methodologies, the class centred the body through both practice-based research and critical engagements with power, history, and legacies of white supremacy on campus. Coalescing these three fields amplifies multifaceted practice-based research approaches to antiracist reflective and body-based engagements with history, place, and self. In the class, I brought together embodied creative modalities with archival, historiographic, place-based, theoretical, and dialogic approaches to knowledge production. I facilitated student development of practice-based research projects invested in building new and ongoing relationships to Davidson College’s violent history and its pervasive continuities felt by members of the community in the present. This article considers how practice-based research can be integrated into critical performance pedagogies to contribute to campus historical reckoning projects. Outlining the course methods and integrating student reflections and projects, the article discusses how a process-oriented conception of performance, combined with a “counter-memorial” approach to pedagogy and practice, can underscore ongoing embodied work required to address what one student defined as “plantation energy” on campus.

Kwesi Gyan: A Cross-Cultural Artistic Impression on Apatampa Musical Resources

Interculturalism has played a significant role in influencing societies’ artistic identity, particularly in Africa’s music. This phenomenon seems to be no exception in the choral, art-song, and instrumental music spheres despite the untapped nature of orchestral music in this part of the world, especially among Ghanaian art/scholar musicians. Orchestral music as a genre in the Neo-African art music space appears deficient in terms of its usage of African resources for creation. The less-to-zero exploitation of this art form has roughly marked a gap in its ingenuous disposition; thus, affording the opportunity for similar works. “Kwesi Gyan”, the 3rd Movement of the ‘Sankɔfa Symphony’ is a 21st-century chamber orchestra piece that merges traditional rhythms and a folk tune from Apatampa music with scholarly compositional techniques. The orchestral form of this music speaks to its Western nature. Likewise, the main melodic and rhythmic structures originate from Ghanaian culture, which illustrates the concept of interculturalism through the aforementioned merger. This paper presented the composition through a practice-based research approach, drawing on theories of cross-cultural music-making and Neo-African art music. It also provided a deeper understanding of the composer’s thought process and provides insight into understanding the piece. Additionally, the article aimed at inspiring creative research into Ghanaian musical arts, potentially contributing to the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage for future generations. Keywords: Interculturalism, composition, African music, Apatampa, Ghanaian musical arts, cultural heritage

Counterfactual and alternative histories as design practice

The version of design that was shaped and perfected during the 20th Century played a huge role in the making of the modern (global northern) world. Whilst design’s potential as a contributor to the making of worlds is clear, its methods, metrics and purposes have led to a world that is increasingly revealed as fragile, broken and unsustainable. In other words, design today is complicit in the breaking of the world – this essay describes a practice-based design research approach to the making of other worlds. Borrowing from the literary approaches of counterfactual and alternative histories and imaginative fiction, it aims to facilitate the development of new approaches to design, informed through alternative ideologies, methods and motivations. 
 The counterfactual approach allows us to imagine other ways to be, in this case through the application of alternative value systems, a non-additive approach to technology and a removal of the constraints imposed by history. The approach can be summed up as follows: 
 
 Definition of the theme followed by a broad mapping of its related systems.
 The creation of a counterfactual timeline based on a different outcome of one or more of the events identified on the real timeline.
 The design of things along the new timeline: hypothetical products, advertising campaigns, images, texts – evidence of the new value system in action.
 
 The most vital use of counterfactuals in design is to allow different voices to emerge that were silenced by the dominant, hegemonic or “standard” narrative(s). As we argue in this essay, illustrated with examples from past and current student projects, alternative histories can open up valuable future paths and create space for rich new imaginaries to flourish.

The Experiment of Jepara Troso Woven in Local Wisdom

Troso woven cloth, located in Troso village, Jepara city, is one of the various Indonesian cultural heritages first discovered in AD. The purposes of this study are: 1) to investigate the woven cloth and its uses, the relationship between woven cloth with cultural and religious traditions, and the relationship between the woven cloth and local identity; 2) to design a new motif of Troso woven cloth that incorporates the elements of Jepara culture. The study used a practice-based research approach. The data were collected by purposive sampling technique. The results showed that the local community commonly uses woven fabric products as decorative. Troso cloth is also used to design attires, gamis dresses, or koko shirts for the feast day or formal events. The craftsmen of Troso woven fabrics made in Jepara primarily receive orders with motifs from other regions, including Bali, Sumatra, and Kalimantan. In contrast, the original woven fabric motifs distinctive from Troso are rarely known to the general public. The study formulates a new digital-based motif of the Troso fabric pattern that displays the iconic elements of Jepara city. The iconic depictions of Jepara are in the form of turtles, Jepara wooden carvings, and wave patterns. This research is expected to elevate the Troso fabric’s identity as a local identity of Jepara city and contribute to the Troso village community to develop the Troso fabric unique to the region.

Immersive media and social change: The ‘empathy machine’ is dead, long live ‘emotional geography’!

Since 2014, immersive media storytelling has gained significant attention, with technologies such as 360° video providing unique first-person experiences, leading to the emergence of immersive journalism and documentaries. Some view immersive media as an “empathy machine” for fostering social change by creating strong connections between the audience and the issues portrayed. This paper critically examines this claim through a practice-based research approach, exploring five socially-driven immersive media projects from 2018-2020 in various countries, and interviewing 21 experts, both scholars and practitioners. The insights derived from this research provide an innovative conceptual framework that encompasses socially-driven immersive media productions, moving from initial empathy towards a more comprehensive concept and phenomenon native to the medium, referred to as “emotional geography”. This framework aims to shed light on the affective dynamics of immersive media in relation to social change, and offers valuable insights for future research, productions and critical discussions on the growing, emotionally-charged digital media ecosystem driven by advancing technologies.

Practice-Based Methodological Design for Performance-Composition and Interdisciplinary Music Research

Practice-based research has gained increasing prominence in the field of creative arts enquiry. Its engagement has fueled disruptive discourse on its nature, methodology and application in music research. Textbooks and journal publications on practice in arts-based research and a host of eminent practitioner-scholars have contributed to this nascent field of study. Several of these publications focus on the creative arts industry with fewer discourse on practice-based research approaches in the subdomains of music. This article deliberates on the multi-facets of practice-based approaches in performance, composition, and interdisciplinary music research. It shares the process of crafting methodological designs that encapsulate research in and of practice. Keywords that frame practice-based techniques include terms such as praxis, divergent and multi-methodological processes, design thinking, and research about/through/for practice as represented by performative-compositional artefacts and their accompanying discourse. Two exemplars are discussed. It argues that practice-oriented research transcends discipline borders encompassing interdisciplinary domains within multidisciplinary co-creational practice. In the author’s music-health studies, she views the interdisciplinarity of science-arts research as interpolated dimensions of collaborative scientific knowledge within an embodied cultural space that yields transformative creativities of translational research to reach its targeted community of users. Practice-centred research in music therefore embraces spheres of investigations with research-informed practice as its focus and its artefacts and discourse as inputs of and outputs from that research, incorporating the overarching paradigms of practice-led research, practice-based research, and creative research in the performing arts.

User Experience and Digital Government: Exploring a Practice-Based Participatory Approach to Identify Research Opportunities

In this case study, the research team (RT) explores user experience design in relation to digital practices adopted by governments. The goal of this first phase was to identify research opportunities. To do so, the RT adopted a practice-centered participatory research approach (Holkup, 2004). The RT began a partnership with a municipal government (City of Edmonton). Regular meetings were held with the partner organization to discuss—among other things—the organization’s structure, current and future projects, the digital editorial strategies implemented by the organization, and the organization's issues and constraints when designing digital services. This allowed the teams to identify not only interesting research questions but also potential teaching collaborations related to work-integrated learning. In this paper, the practice-based participatory research approach is explained, the timeline and the outcome of the partnership are presented, and the lessons learned through that process are shared.

Penerapan Primary Chord dan Secondary Chord dengan Pendekatan Primary Beat pada Mata Kuliah Harmoni Manual

This study aims to provide basic knowledge and skills for students in the application of Primary and Secondary Chords by limiting the chord composition roadmap centered on the melody of the song which is in the primary beat position. This research can be used as a reference for students in restructuring the Chord Progression of a song or better known as the Reharmonization of Chord for the beginner stage. This research method uses a qualitative research method with an Art Practice-Based Research approach with the object of study in the form of a Kelok Sembilan folk song and a literature study on the theory of the concept of the application of Primary and Secondary Chord harmonies. The results showed that the Primary Beat approach made it easier for students to determine the chord progression arrangement for the song twists, students only needed to follow the strong beats of each bar as a reference for determining the chord progression, so both in theory and practice, students did not have much difficulty playing it. This approach is also very effective to be applied in restructuring the chord progression of other simple songs because it is able to give a newer and fresher feel to the chord progression.

A hibridez do biopic

A biopic is neither a documentary nor a fiction film. Each biopic will find its own path in a hybrid territory between these two ways of organizing speeches.Fiction and documentary are different tracks, but not entirely separate. All films are fictional, said Christian Metz. After filming the documentary Nanook, Flaherty reflected: “it is necessary to add fiction so that the real becomes more evident”. But also, as Odin argued, all films can be considered documentaries, because the camera records everything that is placed in front of it, streets, houses, bodies, faces, which are used but not created by the filmmaker.Nowadays, when most fictional films show in the trailer and credits the guarantee “inspired by real events”, it is not surprising that there is a resurgence of biopics, apparently more obliged to be faithful to someone’s biography, but in which the cultural context plus the narrative and dramaturgical needs make it necessary 1) to chose between the facts 2) to invent when there are unknown areas and 3) to make sense of all those choices, often made from our own projections. As Stierle argued, the world is the horizon of fiction and fiction is the horizon of the world as a hypothesis of another world.With a practice-based research approach, we will try to reflect on this genre based on our choices when writing and making the 2017 biopic Zeus.

Cruise trouble. A practice-based approach to studying Arctic cruise tourism

Cruise arrivals in the Arctic often take place in small coastal communities. Although there may be economic benefits for these communities, these are often counterbalanced by social and environmental stresses. In this article, we ask how we can tend to Arctic cruise tourism development using Haraway's concept of staying with the trouble. As a way to bridge often polarized views on cruise tourism as either an economic tool or a destructive force, we propose a practice-based research approach to engage with the complexities of cruise tourism. The aim is to foster response-abililty for Arctic cruise communities to live (better) with cruise tourism. We argue that practice-based approaches help researchers ‘stay with the trouble’ as it is rooted in everyday experiences and the materiality of cruise destinations. Also, its flat ontology supports a ‘tinkering’ approach to cruise practices.

Culturally Influenced Garment Designs: Focused on Ga-Adangbe Cultural Elements in Ghana

This paper describes the creation of garment designs influenced from Ga-Adangbe cultural elements as a personal practice of the author Elsie Rebecca Osei conducted in an art studio context at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology located in Kumasi, Ashanti Region-Ghana. These cultural elements aided in developing interesting fabric designs using dyeing and embellishing techniques before being translated into fashion garments. The professors engaged with the project were Mrs Akosua Amankwa and Prof. Charles Frimpong who guided the direction to be taken in order to achieve the goals set out for the Masters in Fine Art degree. Most of the work for the project was done in the studio together with the supervisors who were critics and a source of encouragement in the completion of the task, guiding every stage of this project. A conceptual model was developed to aid in the practice-based research approach where procedure and findings are stated to influence the field of practice. Empirical field findings were obtained from Agortime and Ga Mashie and Jamestown. Ga Mashie and Jamestown are the two main towns of the Ga people (also known as native Accra) which is made up of the seven quarters of the Ga indigens namely, asɛrɛ, gbese, otublohum, abola, sempe nleshi alata, akanmaje and agortime. This was used to inspire in the making of the garments. The population studied was made up of chiefs, selected elders and indigens of the suburbs of Agortime, Ga Mashie and Jamestown. The purposive sampling technique was used in selecting the respondents of the study. The seven quarters of the Ga people have mantsemei (chiefs) who are the heads of influential patrilineages that have land rights within the quarters. Patrilineage members usually know the clan (we) or major lineage from which they come, which membership is now expressed in their surnames. Relevant procedures and final garments resulting from the studio-practice are presented. The possibility of studio-practice provides students the opportunity to explore the use of other cultural elements in the designing of their fabrics and garments, a situation that seeks to make such cultures appreciated and popular.

A national evaluation of the Irish public health counselling in primary care service\u2013 examination of initial effectiveness data

BackgroundThe Counselling in Primary Care service (CIPC) is the first and only nationally available public counselling service in the Republic of Ireland. This study provides initial data for the effectiveness of short-term psychotherapy delivered in a primary care setting in Ireland for the first time.MethodA practice-based observational research approach was employed to examine outcome data from 2806 clients receiving therapy from 130 therapists spread over 150 primary care locations throughout Ireland. Pre-post outcomes were assessed using the CORE-OM and reliable and clinically significant change proportions. Binary logistic regression examined the effect of pre therapy symptom severity on the log odds of recovering. Six and 12 month follow up data from a subsample of 276 clients were also analysed using growth curve analysis.ResultsOf 14,156 referred clients, 5356 presented for assessment and 52.3% (N = 2806) consented to participate. Between assessment and post-therapy a large reduction in severity of symptoms was observed- Cohen’s d = 0.98. Furthermore, 47% of clients achieved recovery,a further 15.5% reliably improved, 2.7% reliably deteriorated and34.7% showed no reliable improvement. Higher initial severity was associated with less chance of recovering at post-therapy. Significant gains were maintained between assessment and12 months after therapy- Cohen’s d = 0.50.ConclusionsOutcomes for clients in the CIPC service compared favourably with large scale counselling and psychotherapy services in jurisdictions in the U.K., the U.S.A., Norway and Sweden. This study expands the international primary care psychotherapy research base to include the entire Republic of Ireland jurisdiction.

Textile Art Creation as a Tool for Raising Awareness of Corruption in Ghana

Textile art possesses the ability to communicate with the viewer in as much as the viewer understands the visual images. It involves art made of textiles or about textiles by utilising techniques such as embroidery, patchwork, quilting, applique, tapestry, dyeing, and painting, among others. This study explores the use of conventional and non-conventional textile materials in a mixed-media technique in the production of artefacts aimed at raising awareness of corruption in Ghana; a national canker that is retarding the country’s growth. It employed a practice-based research approach to gain new ideas or knowledge in the study through practice. The study revealed that the artefacts serve as an effective communication tool to create awareness of the dangers of corruption in the country, thereby expanding the frontiers of textile art by exploiting various techniques and materials.

<i>Earth Girl Volcano</i>: characterizing and conveying volcanic hazard complexity in an interactive casual game of disaster preparedness and response

Abstract. This paper focuses on the process of developing the Earth Girl Volcano game, and presents some of our best professional practices and lessons learned. The paper shares our experience of weaving storytelling in the not-so-straightforward process of interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists. Our practice-based research approach to games is centered around a diligent and rigorous game development method that is story-centric and that uses storytelling to communicate scientific concepts. Our development methodology is presented in detail without the usual focus on quantitative evaluations: games are not scientific projects but audiovisual interactive catalysts of engagement. The survival of many communities during volcanic emergencies is tied to their knowledge of volcanic preparedness. Unfortunately, there is a gap between scientific terminology and the non-technical language used by the general population. For this reason it is necessary to develop and implement engaging outreach strategies that familiarize communities at risk with volcanic hazards, that show how a volcanic event unfolds, and what to do in case of an emergency. Interactive games provide a perfect alternative to engage communities and to impact their resilience. The Earth Girl Volcano game is about making strategic decisions that minimize risk in communities exposed to volcanic hazards. Conveying the complexities of volcano disaster preparedness to a general audience is a communication challenge in itself because of the multi-layered, interrelated, and technical nature of the information. We use interactive dramatizations of hazard scenarios with people for players to identify with the characters in the game and to empathize with communities impacted by volcanic hazards. We present our approach for characterizing multiple hazard scenarios and dynamics in precise but nimble ways and for designing engaging gameplay within the context of a casual strategy game. We seek to engage mainstream audiences and familiarize them with volcanic evacuations and disaster risk management by providing a high degree of playability, using storytelling to create empathy, making creative use of staging and visuals, and using plain language. We believe that the combination of all these techniques yields a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, a perfect storm that is able to create an emotional connection between players and the hazard scenarios presented in the game.

Introduction

Introduction

Lessons learned in practice-based research: Studying language interventions for young children in the real world.

Practice-based research holds potential as a promising solution to closing the research-practice gap, because it addresses research questions based on problems that arise in clinical practice and tests whether systems and interventions are effective and sustainable in a clinical setting. One type of practice-based research involves capturing practice by collecting evidence within clinical settings to evaluate the effectiveness of current practices. Here, we describe our collaboration between researchers and clinicians that sought to answer clinician-driven questions about community-based language interventions for young children (Are our interventions effective? What predicts response to our interventions?) and to address questions about the characteristics, strengths, and challenges of engaging in practice-based research. We performed a retrospective chart review of 59 young children who had participated in three group language interventions at one publicly funded community clinic between 2012 and 2017. Change on the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS), a government mandated communicative participation measure, was extracted as the main outcome measure. Potential predictors of growth during intervention were also extracted from the charts, including type of intervention received, attendance, age at the start of intervention, functional communication ability pre-intervention, and time between pre- and post-intervention FOCUS scores. Overall, 49% of children demonstrated meaningful clinical change on the FOCUS after their participation in the language groups. Only 3% of participants showed possibly meaningful clinical change, while the remaining 46% of participants demonstrated not likely meaningful clinical change. There were no significant predictors of communicative participation growth during intervention. Using a practice-based research approach aimed at capturing current practice, we were able to answer questions about the effectiveness of interventions delivered in real-world settings and learn about factors that do not appear to influence growth during these interventions. We also learned about benefits associated with engaging in practice-based research, including high clinical motivation, high external validity, and minimal time/cost investment. Challenges identified were helpful in informing our future efforts to examine other possible predictors through development of a new, clinically feasible checklist, and to pursue methods for improving collection of outcome data in the clinical setting.Implications: Clinicians and researchers can successfully collaborate to answer clinically informed research questions while considering realistic clinical practice and using research-informed methods and principles. Practice-based research partnerships between researchers and clinicians are both valuable and feasible.

Visual literacy learning from your environment: A rhizomatic m-learning approach.

Due to the recent widespread adoption of technologies such as the internet, social media, and digital image capture and creation, the average person today needs to decode and process information from many different formats and media to fully participate in the contemporary world (Tertiary Education Commission, 2008; Hanifan, 2008). This study aimed to address this need by exploring how the visuals one encounters every day can be leveraged as opportunities for learning visual literacy. The aim operates on the presupposition that a person is surrounded by visuals in their everyday environment which they could potentially analyse to deepen their knowledge. However, learning from visuals in one’s environment is often beyond the capabilities of novice learners, due to a lack of learning support in this informal learning setting. Therefore, this study propositioned a learning model of visual skills based on mobile learning (m-learning) and rhizomatic learning.
 M-learning allows learners to learn in multiple contexts, across time and space, through social and content interactions, using personal electronic devices so that learning can be available everywhere and every time (Crompton, 2013; Georgiev, Georgieva, & Smrikarov, 2004). This leads to learning that can be more situated in a learner’s surroundings (Gikas & Grant, 2013), which is an attractive proposition when considering how learners can learn from life’s everyday imagery when they are separated from traditional learning support. 
 In rhizomatic learning, the curriculum is not predefined by experts or teachers, instead, “community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions” (Cormier, 2008, p. 5). In this way, rhizomatic learning communities can provide crowd-sourced peer support as ubiquitous as imagery is.
 The learning model proposed in this presentation was arrived at by utilising a practice-based research approach. The learning model was implemented and tested as prototype for an app. Usability testing and interviews were used to qualitatively evaluate the prototype, as well as the underlying learning model. The outcomes of the study demonstrate that visual literacy can be achieved by novice learners from contingent learning encounters in informal learning environments through collaboration and by providing context-aware learning support. The presentation will focus on the outcome of the study, which is the learning model and its pedagogical assumptions.