Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

This article is an autoethnographic account of my journey from theatre stage manager to academic stage manager. Performing arts education and training in Higher Education is a diverse field, ranging from small private institutions to large research lead universities. Professional practitioners (performers, stage managers, technicians, designers, directors, etc.) are sought by all types of institution to share their expertise in teaching, yet find themselves working in a world that is familiar (the theatre) but at the same time alien (the academy). Those who make a successful transition find a way to reconcile these contrasting worlds. I hope, through this paper, to contribute to discussion of the challenges this transition entails through critical reflection and contextualisation of my personal journey.

Doctoral learning entails transition from experienced student to stance-defending researcher, exposed to international critique: a disorientation and reorientation into a new identity. Arts and Humanities candidates typically navigate these moves without much of a map, choosing their own topics, avoiding the more externally defined approach available to STEM students, and mapping out their own research routes. They are often driven by desire and passion for their topic. Much of each candidate’s core identity will be inflected by this transition of emergence, a transition that involves their embodiment, emotion and social persona. With intense and sometimes uncomfortable transition in mind, and desire as driver, new materialism, namely nomadic feminism and queer theory, can inform doctoral pedagogy in Arts and Humanities. The destabilization of normativity opens the potentials and challenges of inhabited and performed identity. Queer theory’s longstanding negotiation of social and personal tensions gives a heuristic model for understanding doctoral identity transition.

Integration of music in an academic university teaching setting is an example of how artistic practice and competences have potentials to resonate beyond the immediate discipline. The article explores music activities as contributing to learning environments for university students, creating shared experiences in groups of diverse learners with different needs. The music activities are discussed in light of challenges in today's university concerning student diversity. Two empirical examples of experiments with music in university teaching at a Danish university are presented. Empirical data were collected by means of qualitative research methods (teaching logs and qualitative surveys) and analysed in a socio-cultural learning perspective. The first empirical example presents music as supporting students relate to each other in the classroom. The second example describes how music may support students' sensory awareness when practising qualitative research like fieldwork. Both examples imply interdisciplinary potentials of putting music into play in university pedagogy.

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Canadian faculty of education explore their past positionings within the postdoctoral space. We share personal narratives related to issues of agency and identity in our relatively ill-defined positions. Similar to other early career academics, our reflections expose key concerns surrounding clarity of expectations, workload and work/life balance, and issues related to community and collegiality. In addition, we identify institutional or structural constraints that need to be reconciled in order to support postdoctoral scholars in their aspirations for success on personal and institutional levels. We provide recommendations and invite dialogue with regard to this emerging role in faculties of education.

This article presents the Pilgrimage Model as a template for educators wishing to lead students on site-specific studies of engaged learning. During the 2015–2016 academic year, a group of Georgetown University students, faculty, and staff pursued the Pilgrimage Project, a year-long pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary education and speculative design. Students researched Georgetown’s historic Old North building from a variety of disciplinary angles and presented the results of their collective research in an on-site multimedia exhibit. The article analyzes the Pilgrimage Project from a practical perspective, as an effective means of delivering robust educational experiences, and from a theoretical perspective, as an example of speculative method in education research. As a model of interdisciplinary education, the Pilgrimage Model effectively merges disciplinary-specific course goals, in-depth student-led research, and student skill development in digital design and multimedia production.

In comparison with classroom settings that are more accessible to the scrutiny of researchers and institutional monitoring, the one-to-one setting of instrumental and vocal studio teaching has been described as a ‘secret garden’. The physical isolation of the music studio has deep roots within the traditions of apprenticeship and embodies aspects of conservatoire culture that are sometimes carried over into other musical styles. With a focus on higher education, this paper explores the nature and significance of isolation for the studio, alongside some of the benefits, limitations, and challenges that it offers. The authors contend that the physical disposition of the studio within the institution gives implicit support to the attitudes and assumptions that sustain traditional approaches to music performance teaching, and that making them explicit can help to open those approaches to further challenge, review and development.

In this article, we present a newly developed undergraduate module that is taught in the Humanities Department of the University of Roehampton. Campus and university themselves are the topics of the module. The module provides an opportunity for the students to engage academically with their environment. They study not only many interesting stories related to the campus, its buildings and artworks and the history(ies) of the university and its constituent colleges, they also explore their historical contexts. They have the rare chance to engage with original artefacts and archival materials directly unmediated by editorial and scholarly work. For their assignments, the students conduct research projects that are based on the resources of campus and university. They are required to present the results of their research in a public forum to provide them, early in their university studies, with experience of public engagement.

Humanities researchers have expressed concern about the uncritical adoption of information visualization techniques originating in the sciences by digital humanities classrooms. This paper describes an approach to information visualization that encourages students to foreground humanistic concerns by adopting a narrative focus. This approach to visualization development brings interdisciplinary perspectives and techniques to bear on qualitative or quantitative information and constructs stories from those data. To illustrate student experiences, I describe four student projects completed in a graduate course on narrative information visualization. I focus on how this course enabled students to take diverse types of data and construct engaging interactive stories using a range of tools and methods, while continually reflecting critically on their evolving goals and design choices. I conclude by showing how this approach helps students connect humanistic values to information visualization techniques.

This article addresses a question still frequently posed in the context of UK universities which offer courses in the visual arts: Does the PhD research model of contributing new knowledge fit art, where there are no definitive answers and the main strength of the research is its ability to question?, answering in the positive by distinguishing between propositional knowledge and understanding. It acknowledges the range of work already published on this topic and distils an aesthetic cognitivist position from which the visual arts are construed as powerful means of deepening our understanding, a source of non-propositional knowledge on a par with, although qualitatively different from, the way that the sciences are construed as the means to propositional knowledge. The distinguishing feature of the article is its attempt to provide a relatively concise overview of the background and structure of the case for the inclusivity of research through visual arts practices at doctoral level in the universities, based upon an aesthetic cognitivist position which I hope will support research supervisors and others charged with advocating the viability of practice-based or practice-led doctoral proposals ¹ in university cross-disciplinary research degrees’ committees.