Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

While the majority of creative, performing and literary artists are self-employed, relatively few tertiary arts schools attempt to develop capabilities for venture creation and management (and entrepreneurship more broadly) and still fewer do so effectively. This article asks why this is the case. It addresses underlying conceptual and philosophical issues encountered by arts educators, arguing that in all three senses of the term – new venture creation, career self-management, and being enterprising – entrepreneurship is essential to career success in the arts. However, the practice of entrepreneurship in the arts is significantly different from the practice of entrepreneurship in business, in terms of the artist’s drivers and aims, as well as the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities, contexts and processes. These differences mean that entrepreneurship curricula cannot simply be imported from business schools. This article also examines the arts-idiosyncratic challenge of negotiating distinctive and potentially conflicting entrepreneurial aims, using career identity theory. It concludes by suggesting strategies by which adaptive entrepreneurial artist identities can be developed through higher education programs.

In the international higher education environment there is evidence of continuing growth and interest in creative and performing arts programs. While there is similar growth in the creative industries sector where these students will seek to develop a career, as well as further validation of the importance of creativity in the future workplace, ongoing challenges remain for educators in attempting to create a smooth and effective transition for artists who rarely follow a typical linear career path. This article overviews an initial research project which seeks to investigate the value and impact of industry-based internships in the creative and performing arts, involving a sample of graduates and industry employers from a regional area of northern Australia. The findings suggest that while internships offer a range of benefits for students and employers, there are significant challenges and issues which not only affect current practice but require additional research and investigation.

This article reflects my journey as a performing arts student and intern both in Portugal and abroad. It is not intended as a personal journal, but rather a reflection and an aftermath comment on my experiences and learning processes. First it provides a context regarding my university education in a Southern European country, against a previous British background. It then describes my experiences interning in Wales and in Denmark. It deliberates on the challenges and opportunities one may find in an internship situation and what one can gain from it. I conclude with the idea of some future career paths and career development opportunities for young performing arts professionals.

Higher education programs in Puerto Rico include undergraduate degrees in music, music education, composition, popular music, jazz and Caribbean music, and, most recently, a master’s degree in music education. However, little is known about what music graduates do after concluding college. Do they work in music-related areas? Are they satisfied with their music preparation and work? The scarcity of research in this topic, along with the singularity of the island’s geographical situation, offers a distinctive opportunity to study graduates from different higher education institutions, in order better to understand the relationship between their achieved academic preparation and their future work.

The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has recently transformed its curriculum through a process of curriculum reform. This has been a major institutional transition and has challenged many of the traditional practices of the conservatoire. Taking the global thinking on curriculum reform as its starting point, the conservatoire’s aspiration has been to open up the traditionally narrow conservatoire curriculum: to provide more flexibility in terms of student choice and, importantly not only for our particular institutional circumstances but also for the direction of travel in the creative professions, to provide opportunities to collaborate with other artistic disciplines. This article reflects on the process of this project, the challenges that we negotiated and the emerging outcomes.

Exploring the manner in which professional identity formation in emerging conductors is entangled with the cultural context of orchestras, I focus on the amorphous evolution from a student identity to that of a professional, illuminating some underlying social conditions of the ever-elusive profession of conducting. Prevailing assumptions about professionalism and orchestral practice are addressed, and I consider the implications of these issues for emerging conductors of the twenty-first century. Although one’s own status as a professional musician can be a delicate subject indeed, in this article I reflect on a period of time during the early years of my conducting career: a transition bracketed by distinctive moments of identity formation. In doing so I offer not an ethnography, but a particular experience – one that transformed my conception of orchestral music-making from a product-centric approach to one that is practice-inspired.

Extra-curricular activities have for many years been a prominent and valuable feature of UK university music departments, but the current political and economic climate poses several significant threats to their survival, including uncertain funding, demands on students’ time (including the need to undertake paid employment), and, potentially, the reduction of music in the school curriculum, limiting the number of students equipped to study music in higher education. Amongst this uncertainty, articulating the value of extra-curricular music-making becomes ever more important. This article draws on an empirical investigation of current practice in extra-curricular music, and considers the ways in which staff and students negotiate the aims, experiences and roles that shape a department’s performing culture. The transitions of learner roles, increasing independence and musical identity inherent in these practices are considered here, and some conclusions drawn about the contribution of extra-curricular learning to university experience.

This article focuses on the phenomenon of ‘rupture’ identified in student narratives of uncertainty and scholarship experienced during the course of Fine Art research degrees in two Australian universities. Rupture captures the phenomenon of severe disruption or discontinuity in existing knowledge and typically signifies epistemological rift for the students. On one level candidates become anxious and directionless; on another they adapt and resolve the challenges they face. All candidates enter research degrees ready to be challenged, but can soon become overwhelmed by what they perceive as chaos in their thinking, combined with organizational hurdles and, in the disciplinary area of fine art, an unfamiliar and newly evolving community of practice. They identify struggle as a crucial stage in their scholarly development, knowledge construction and the advancement of research and art making in their discipline area. This article advances a perspective on the roles of challenge and adaptivity in knowledge production that further informs the literature on the supervision needs of new researchers.

This article provides a reflective perspective on the role that research-led teaching plays in the development of future arts workers in higher education. It explores the challenges faced by lecturers developing curricula in the performing and creative arts and argues that the increasing focus on employability can conflict with universities’ traditional aim of developing conceptual and critical thinkers. The article charges that the UK’s higher education sector is rapidly transforming itself into a two-tier system, which is serving to dichotomize vocational and academic learning even further. It concludes with a call for universities, students and employers to reject the false dichotomy between vocational and academic learning and perceive education in a more holistic, longitudinal sense, which might in turn develop more balanced graduates who excel in networked knowledge, conceptual and theoretical imagination and critical, lateral thinking.

This research study explores the assessment practices in two higher education art and design departments. The key aim of this research was to explore art and design studio assessment practices as lived and experienced by art and design lecturers. This work draws on two bodies of pre-existing research. Firstly this study adopted methodological approaches that have been employed to good effect to explore assessment in text based subjects (think aloud) and moderation mark agreement (observation). Secondly the study builds on existing research into the assessment of creative practice. By applying thinking aloud methodologies in a creative practice assessment context the authors seek to illuminate the ‘in practice’, rather than espoused, assessment approaches adopted. The analysis suggests that lecturers in the study employed three macro conceptions of quality to support the judgement process, namely the demonstration of significant learning over time, the demonstration of effective studentship and the presentation of meaningful art/design work.

The current study takes an exploratory approach to investigate which situational factors influence perceptions of psychological contracts, as well as the content that comprises psychological contracts in the dance training industry. Semi-structured interviews (n = 10) were conducted with students enrolled in a higher education institution in Australia. Results indicated that intending dancers take several factors into consideration when contemplating a professional dance career: natural progression of skill, employment opportunities, location, and peer recommendation. In addition, intending dancers have several perceived institutional obligations: skill development, quality of teachers and training, and networking opportunities. The current article adds novel insights to dance education literature by considering the trainee–institution relationship through the psychological contract lens. It is anticipated that the findings will assist future research that seeks to incorporate student perceptions into dance curriculum development.

This article outlines the activities of the research network ‘Festival Performance as a State of Encounter’, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Beyond Text strategic programme. The network was formulated in 2008, and a range of different events were organized over the course of two years to explore the concept of relational performance within the context of popular music festivals. One of the central aims of the network was to bring into dialogue scholars from a range of disciplines within the performing arts and creative industries and industry professionals and practitioners working on the festival circuit. The network provided a meeting place for industry–academy collaboration that prompted genuine exchange and knowledge transfer across sectors and challenged assumptions about the role and value of expertise and experience in relation to research processes. The article examines the notion of encounter and co-creation not only as a method of practice in festival performance but also as a methodology for facilitating fruitful conversation and dynamic interaction between stakeholders with a shared interest in understanding the deep impact of embodied participation in festival spaces.

This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss these strategies based on video documentation as well as the students’ written reports and discussion comments. Overall, the students gradually shifted the emphasis of their work from temporally differentiated, imitative parallelisms between drawing and music toward more conversational and socially oriented strategies as well as more global strategies of representation employing common mental images. These findings are discussed with a view to future pedagogical work incorporating music with visual art, arguing that 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.

Formal ceramics art education is becoming a fundamental requirement for professional practice in ceramics in Nigeria. Considering the ample resources available for ceramic practices in the country with a teeming population of over 140 million people, there is a promising future for the art, in spite of the effects of globalization and inter-cultural infiltrations. Despite the existing raw material potential, ceramic resources are still underutilized, while the ceramic art programme still cannot produce individuals who can function productively in a highly competitive ceramics market economy. An appraisal of the professional engagement of art and design graduates does not find the objectives of the programme in Nigerian tertiary institutions to be met. This article examines the current status of ceramic art education by identifying existent problems and inherent potentialities, as well as suggesting a way forward through repositioning art education in Nigeria.

This article asks: what is the significance of design history within higher education? It reviews the practice and purpose of design history, in the education of historically aware and critically engaged designers, as an emerging independent discipline, and in terms of what the subject has to offer allied fields such as history, sociology, cultural studies, history of technology, area studies and anthropology. It considers the development and current state of design history as it is taught in the UK and non-Anglophone Europe (including France, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey and Greece), in the US, Australia and East Asia. The argument that follows is grounded in recent design historical scholarship, combined with the views of design historians working in the abovementioned countries, in order to provide both a contemporary perspective on current practice and suggestions about possible futures.