Transitions: Critical thresholds in the creative and performing arts

The Creative and Performing Arts have, in recent decades, both increased in scope and size within Higher Education and emerged as a desirable student experience, a location for innovative research, and more recently, a focus for debates about how Higher Education interacts with wider publics and communities through the prisms of public engagement, access and knowledge exchange. Whilst the admission of the creative and performing arts to the academy has taken place at different historical moments and at different rates, they now collectively represent an impressive and dynamic component of university life, attracting students, securing research investment and significantly adding to the cultural, social and economic life of their host localities and beyond.

With admission and establishment come new priorities, concerns and interests – both for the academic community within the creative and performing arts, but also for university managements, higher education funders and wider public stakeholders. Around the world questions of value-for-money, graduate employability, economic and social return on research investment and the shape, size and structure of university funding are placing all disciplines under pressure to address questions about their value and contribution in historically new and sharper ways. Disciplinary reflexivity now has to find new ways, and possibly even new languages, with which to engage these agendas.

In this Special Issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education we present a selection of papers and reports under the rubric of ‘Transitions – Critical Thresholds in the Creative and Performing Arts’; these exhibit how some areas of the creative and performing arts are exercising precisely this sense of disciplinary reflexivity. In this context ‘transitions’ encompasses moments of passage between important domains and statuses: for example, the movement from compulsory to post-compulsory education for the intending student of the creative and performing arts; the complex interchange between disciplinary education and training and transferability; the subsequent passage from university to the world of professional practice; and the challenges faced by practitioners engaging with research (and vice versa) and of the two-way passage of knowledge between the academy and professional practice. It is in these contexts that questions of value and contribution and the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of discipline and academic organisation come into sharp relief. In each case deeply held prior norms, values and expectations may be subject to interrogation and challenge, with important consequences not only for educational and career development, for example, but for the complex relationship between personal, creative and professional identity for staff, students and practitioners. New expectations have to be negotiated, with consequent implications in many cases for personal purpose, professional direction and sense of belonging. In this Special Issue, our contributors have addressed a range of these critical thresholds across the Higher Education mission.

The first is the growth of an interest in enterprise and entrepreneurship education within the creative and performing arts consequent upon the global interest in the value and impact of the creative industries. The recognition by governments of the economic and social value of the creative industries has created both opportunities and challenges for arts educators, prompting critical debate both about the desirability of this on the one hand, and then on the other, reflection on how this might be intelligently achieved. In ‘Not a dirty word: arts entrepreneurship and higher education’, Ruth Bridgstock deploys career identity theory to examine how entrepreneurship education might be subtly nuanced to the adaptive entrepreneurial identity and capabilities of the artist. She importantly argues that effective entrepreneurship education must be situated within productive dialogue with the formation of disciplinary identity and practice and explores possible avenues for this. Taking up the challenge of the transition from the academy to the world of practice, Ryan and Leah Daniel's ‘Enhancing the transition from study to work: Reflections on the value and impact of internships in the creative and performing arts’ examines the increasingly complex educational and acclimatisation role expected of internships in creative and performing arts education. Arguing that the value of work-based internship learning requires careful shared understanding and management at the interface of academy and internship host, such interaction draws the academy and the creative industries into direct dialogue with each other; we then have Maria Carneiro's New Voice contribution: ‘University-employment transitions in international performing arts: The intern's story’.

The transition between academy and practice is the focus of contributions by Ponchione and by Latorre and Lorenzo with respect to the music industry. In a New Voice reflection on the personal experience of graduating from student conductor to professional musician, ‘Identity formation for an emerging conductor’, Ponchione foregrounds the ways in which the expectations and identity implicitly fostered during education and training were sharply challenged by the realities of precarious professional practice and the need to supplement creative earnings with other activities. Challenging the traditional models of professional status ascription, Ponchione argues for the need to think professional identity holistically, moving away from the singular artistic identity (supported by its unmentioned embarrassing non-creative other) towards an openly acknowledged identification of mutuality. Latorre and Lorenzo, in a brief project Area Study, explore the expectations of and attitudes towards professional practice of music graduates in Puerto Rico. Evidencing high levels of job satisfaction but low levels of economic satisfaction among practising graduate musicians, they argue that new regulations in the Puerto Rican Higher Education system restricting the elective programmes in arts, may compel music programmes to consider a broader range of career destinations requiring other competences and capabilities.

The challenges set by the need to address a broader career spectrum in the creative and performing arts may have very specific resonance within the conservatoire model. Celia Duffy, in ‘Negotiating with tradition: Curriculum reform and institutional transition in a conservatoire’, reports on how the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland reviewed and revised its traditional art-form curriculum to reflect broader trends in the creative professions, especially with respect to the priorities of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration typical of work in the creative industries. In particular she suggests that challenges and impediments to the review and reform of the traditional curriculum can be addressed through six principles which range from the integration of reflection with performance excellence at one end to considering the diverse range of ways in which graduates make a contribution to the world – as artists, educators, advocates and citizens at the other. In ‘Would you credit it? Navigating the transitions between curricular and extra-curricular learning in university music departments’, Stephanie Pitts similarly reports on the changing state and status of the UK university Music's so-called ‘extra-curricular’ activities – once the traditional core of university music – at a time when the current political and economic climate poses significant threats to their survival. And Stanway, Bordia and Fein's ‘Raising the curtain: Exploring dancers’ perceptions of obligation through the psychological contract lens’ echoes Duffy's urging of student involvement in curriculum development in their paper examining the role of the psychological contract in dance education in framing student expectations. Understanding the situational factors influencing student dancer perception of the obligations of the institutional provider might be critical in how institutions prepare the student for future professional life.

The complexities of knowledge exchange processes are highlighted by O'Grady and Kill's ‘Exploring festival performance as a state of encounter’ in their reflections on the experience of leading a research project that foregrounded the co-creational role of industry and community in the research process. Examining the notion of encounter within the context of festivals, they argue that ‘deep impact’ becomes possible when research networks move beyond ‘text’ to ‘memory, experience and embodied participation’. A very different, but similarly ‘impactful’ encounter, reported by Huovinen and Manneberg, was between students beginning drawing and free improvising musicians in order to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. ‘Imitation, interaction and imagery: Learning to improvise drawing with music’ argues that such boundary-crossing interactive contexts not only provide understanding of the temporal, processual, and social potential of visual art, but also hold a key to the students’ exploration of their own budding artistic autonomy.

Orr and Bloxham, in ‘Making judgements about students making work: Lecturers’ assessment practices in art and design’, address the processes by which teachers in art and design make assessments of student practice. Starting from the premise that reflexivity demonstrates disciplinary specificity, they argue that studio based pedagogy involves three orders of judgment: learning over time, effective studentship, and the presentation of meaningful art and/or design work which lead to a subtle de-differentiation between the student and the work. Making this explicit may require a reformulation of assessment practices that focus on the assessment for learning and the assessment of learning. The dissonant binary experienced by research students in the Fine Arts is at the centre of Simmons and Holbrook’s paper, ‘From rupture to resonance: uncertainty and scholarship in Fine Art research degrees’, examining the conditions of epistemological complexity that greet the new practice-based research student on admission. The challenges of addressing epistemological complexity may be experienced chaotically by the new research student, leading to confusion, doubt and uncertainty. Such personally experienced sense of rupture, rather than being seen as problematic, may, with appropriate supervisory response, represent a powerful stage in the journey of the student to independent scholarship.

In an Essay examining his own career trajectory, Walmsley reflects on the growing role of research-led teaching in the creative and performing arts. Acknowledging the growing complexity of the relationship of the academy to the creative industries, he argues that learning and assessment need to be informed by a range of models and priorities suggesting a need for synthesis and compromise as a way out of the polarisation wrought by the distinction between vocational and academic education. Significantly, he suggests that the practical location for this work might lie within the emergent role of the arts within the wider agenda relating to knowledge exchange – the process of two-way interchange between the academy and its communities.

Engaging the curriculum with new imperatives in a radically different context is also at the heart of the Area Study by Kashim and Adelabu on the potential for ceramic arts education to make a significant contribution to Nigeria's future economic prospects. The Nigerian arts education curriculum, they argue, needs to be reformed if the country is to be able to exploit its resources in ceramic arts. This would need to encompass a range of priorities including enhanced arts education and engagement with research and student learning in the area of cultural and social values.

Finally, the complex interaction between academy and society and economy that informs the development of new disciplinary areas is the subject of Huppatz and Lees-Maffei's ‘Why Design History? A multi-national perspective on the state and purpose of the field’. This examines how wider cultural and creative developments imply a necessary re-positioning of design history from a subaltern ‘service’ activity of the discipline of design (dominated by the history of design and the construction of canonical design practice) towards an inclusive examination of the multiply mediated relationships between cultural production and consumption. Acknowledging its inter-disciplinary proximity to a range of other academic disciplines on the one hand (sociology, technology studies, anthropology, for example) and rapidly growing areas of public interest in heritage, family history, etc., design history may represent a new discipline capable of capturing the sense of disciplined but engaged academic and intellectual practice argued for in many of the papers in this issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.

Whilst the present social, cultural and economic conjuncture presents a complex set of challenges for higher education and its communities, the arts and humanities more broadly and the creative and performing arts in particular are clearly rising to them. In this Special Issue we can see how the creative and performing arts are mobilising disciplinary reflexivity in conjunction with generic educational objectives across the full spectrum of activity: from undergraduate education to post-graduate, across research and onto the question of their wider social value.