Equally engaged : demystifying tertiary study in the creative arts to equity communities

The participation rate of students from low socio-economic (SES) backgrounds into Australian universities remains low. A nationwide initiative to raise participation rates aims to stimulate interest, highlight career possibilities and enhance understanding of university. The program also aims to improve retention and completion rates of those students. This paper provides a case study and preliminary evaluation of QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty’s (CIF) outreach programs to low SES school students, operating since 2012. Programs are conducted across the disciplines of Dance, Drama, Media, Digitalstorytelling, Music and Entertainment. Presenting the arts and creative industries as a viable study / career pathway is particularly challenging to low SES groups. However, the focus on the creative industries aims to broaden understanding of arts and creativity, emphasising the significance of digital technology in the transformation of the workforce, providing new career opportunities in the creative and non-creative sectors. CIF’s outreach programs have been delivered to hundreds of students and this paper presents a case study and evaluation of several programs.

Learnings from the implementation of performance psychology as a subject within a university dance program

Similar to the focus on training in the technical, physical and artistic areas of dance, dance professionals, students and educators alike appear to be developing an increased awareness of how important training in psychology is to their success within dance. Over the past 4 years, lectures in performance psychology have been incorporated as part of a compulsory professional skills subject for second and third year students within a University dance program. The following presentation aims to share practitioner experience and learnings regarding the implementation of this subject within this context, its perceived effectiveness, and recommendations for future use.

Creative expression as the objective in video games

This study explores the idea of video games where the players are not just allowed to express themselves creatively, but are challenged to do so and are judged based on the quality of their creative expression. The outcome of the research is a series of six games which comment on this idea. The study also raises further questions regarding how current video games are constructed and designed in comparison with non-computer games, and invites a further evolution of the craft of video game design in a direction that focuses more on interpreting and reacting to what the player is doing.

Building communities through co-creative storytelling : sound walking in New England

The Story Project is a small, not-for-profit community media arts company based on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It specialises in facilitating first-person storytelling. Since 2012 The Story Project has been collaborating with a small community arts organisation based in northern NSW, Uralla Arts, to record local heritage in first-person story form and to curate and present it ways that will appeal to new generations of listeners. The initial collaboration was funded by a Federal government Community Heritage program. The project successfully adapted a participatory method of life storytelling to this regional context and some 40 stories were contributed to a collection. A more ambitious suite of projects to develop soundwalks in a number of towns across the New England region has since grown from this initial collaboration. The soundwalks seek to combine local creative works in oral story, music and visual forms, and make them accessible through an application that can be downloaded to GPS-enabled mobile devices. While soundwalks are not new, the needs and challenges of creative community-building that New England soundwalks attempt to solve in this regional setting hold value for a broader range of interests than just those of the immediate project stakeholders. This paper reports on a research collaboration between The Story Project and QUT researchers that looked at The Story Project’s engagement with Uralla Arts and other New England community-based networks and organisations. It considers how this instance of story-centred, participatory media arts practice contributes to building population-wide capacity for creative expression.

Being innovative without being creative

Not all innovations require a creative genius, an IT nerd, or a statistician. Smart organizations follow a playbook with four different strategies.

Changing other people’s mind : creative entrepreneurs

Creative entrepreneurs, the business executives who operate in the creative industries sector of economy, possess distinctive characteristics that influence people around them due to the nature of creative industries, their position in the society and their relations with people within their business operation. While there is a large amount of research focusing on industry development; the research on creative entrepreneurs as a group is much less, let alone their influence on people associated with them. Through exploring literatures on entrepreneurship in creative industries, leadership with particular focus on charismatic and shared leadership, cognitive psychology and the psychology of entrepreneurship, this study integrates seemingly remote notions from different disciplines and concludes that creative entrepreneurs as a special group of entrepreneurs influence other people in their operational settings. These settings are culturally stimulating and provocative. Creative entrepreneurs change people’s way of thinking through their intrinsic attributes and nature of the creative industries.

Contexts, codes and online communications – a case study exploring issues related to using CMCs in a drama education project

Many educators are currently interested in using computer-mediated communications (CMCs) to support learning and creative practice. In my work I have been looking at how we might create drama through using cyberspaces, working with teachers and students in secondary school contexts. In trying to understand issues that have arisen and ways of working with the data I have found a number of frameworks helpful for analysing the online interactions. These frameworks draw from O'Toole's work on contexts negotiated in the creation of drama and other frameworks drawn from Wertsch, Bakhtin and Vygotsky's work on speech utterances, dialogic processes and internalisation of learning. The contexts and factors which must be negotiated in online communications within learning contexts are quite complex and educators may need to provide parameters and protocols to ensure appropriate languages, genres and utterances are utilised. The paper explores some of the types of languages, genres and utterances that emerged from a co-curricula drama project and issues that arose, including the importance of establishing processes for giving and receiving critical feedback This paper is of relevance to those whose research strategies may involve the use of computer-mediated communications as well as those utilising cyberspaces in educational contexts.

An analysis of digital storytelling as a documentation tool for research in the creative and performing arts

This paper examines the capacity of digital storytelling to document research activity in the creative and performing arts. In particular, it seeks to identify the thought processes and methods that underpin this research and to capture them using the digital storytelling medium. Interest in this issue was prompted by the author’s work with the creative and performing artists from the Queensland Conservatorium and the Queensland College of Art as part of the Federal government’s Research Quality Framework (RQF) in 2007. The RQF compelled artists to address what it means to undertake research in their disciplines, to describe this, measure it and quantify it; for many practitioners this represents a significant challenge. These issues continue to be pertinent in the context of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. This research is significant because it seeks to identify, in layman’s terms, the research methods and thought processes used by artists in their research practice. It seeks to do so free of the encumbrances of the professional doctorate policies, the higher education research quality frameworks, and the dense philosophical debates that have to-date dominated discussions of this issue. The research involves qualitative data collection methods including a detailed literature review, interviews with key practitioners and academics involved in the creative and performing arts, and three case studies. The literature review focuses on publications that explore issues of research practice and method in the creative and performing arts. The case studies involve three Queensland-based artists. Digital stories will be developed (and presented) with Marcus and Mafe using their visual materials and drawing on the issues identified in the literature review and interviews. Emmerson’s DVD provided a point of comparison with the digital stories. (Brief bios are attached)

How can partnerships between the universities and schools exploit new opportunities for pedagogies at the intersection of the arts/design and the sciences?

Driven by information accessibility-on-demand provided by the internet, education modes are changing from a teacher-led approach focused on content delivery and assessible outcomes, to a learner-based approach encouraging self-directed, peer-tutored, and cooperative learning. New pedagogies are required to extend learning beyond the classroom and traditional subject areas such as contemporary arts, in alignment with the cross disciplinary priorities of the Australian Curriculum and values of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. This research explores how partnerships with universities and cultural organisations are implicated in the generation of these new forms of pedagogy and contribute to the field of educational research within the context of Education Queensland’s Framework For Gifted Education. In particular, this paper explores a new pedagogical framework for highly capable year five to nine Queensland state school students at the intersection of arts, design and the sciences, which has arisen from an explicit secondary/ tertiary partnership between the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty and Precincts and the Queensland Academies Young Scholars Program. The Young Scholars Program offers experiences in the International Baccalaureate and Australian Curriculum contexts to enhance outcomes via global understanding, unique industry partnerships and 21st century pedagogical innovation based not on 'content' but tacit/experiential learning concepts including immersive, creative, intellectual and social strategies. These strategies for highly capable students are centred around authentic opportunities, primary resources, transdisciplinary learning and relationships with likeminded peers including tertiary arts, design and STEM educators and students, professionals and researchers. The presentation details case studies which are hands-on real time workshops involving inquiry based challenges in the arts, design and sciences, mathematics, history, creative writing and other disciplines, with content drawn from collections from public institutions, academic research and tertiary pedagogy. Both programs implicate student collaboration and creative production as methodology/data capture for ongoing action research, in alignment with the Framework For Gifted Education’s emphasis on evidence-based practices. They also challenge gifted students “to continue their development through curricular activities that require depth of study, complexity of thinking, fast pace of learning, high-level skills development and/or creative and critical thinking (e.g. through independent investigations, tiered tasks, diverse real-world applications, mentors)”(Education Queensland, 2011:3). This presentation highlights the strengths of the ongoing collaboration between QUT Creative industries Faculty and Queensland Academies, which not only provides successful extra curricular activities for gifted students towards a place in the International Baccalaureate Program, but also provides mentoring opportunities for tertiary students in their field of endeavor to assist with their own learning, and unique research opportunities for the Faculty as it focuses on excellence in arts, design and creative education and research. Education Queensland.(2011). Framework For Gifted Education Revised Edition 2011 (accessed Nov 19 2011)

Talking across the fence : partners for art education

This presentation explores a model for building and sustaining secondary – tertiary partnerships in Arts education. It traces the evolution of partner relationships in a challenging educational landscape, assesses the value of dialogue between educators, design professionals and community stakeholders, and tells the story of a particular secondary – tertiary partnership exploring new pedagogy in Art and Design, between Kelvin Grove State College, the School of Design Creative Industries Faculty of QUT, and the Design Minds program of the State Library of Queensland. Among other benefits, tertiary and industry partners have brought a myriad of diverse voices into the classrooms, enabled the direct interaction of learners with tertiary student mentors, and with art and design practitioners. The working model has also now matured into formal and informal partner agreements that help guarantee its viability into the future. This presentation, which deals with the opening of new terrain between committed partners, is also the story of how design has gradually been integrated in the curriculum, enriching and expanding the repertoire of Art programs, and how one Visual Art Faculty in a large inner city Brisbane School has adopted design thinking and “metadesign” as a model for future innovation. From the process of interaction and dialogue among educators and practitioners over several years has emerged a conviction that both partnering and design pedagogy are key tools in developing forward thinking curriculum for the Arts. In addition, hammering out a model that works for students across different year levels and in diverse settings by putting ideas into practice and micro-managing this process in studios and workshops has challenged teachers to rethink their own Art pedagogy. Finally, in the ecosystem of Schools and in the wider systems that are now driving change in education, survival for the Arts may depend on the networking and affirmation derived from innovating partners. Our story, the story of committed individuals who have sustained a dialogue across boundaries, may provide a valuable model for other arts educators fighting to retain agency in their schools.

Pharmacy educators' intention for the curriculum : an Australian pilot study

Background: Pharmacy educators play an important role in supporting the professional identity formation of students, particularly in relation to their perceptions and strategies for the curriculum and subsequent learning experiences. Aim: To explore pharmacy educators’ perceptions of the purpose of the pharmacy curriculum and how they contribute to students’ development as pharmacists. Methods: A one-off survey using a 20-item questionnaire distributed to all pharmacy educators at a single school of pharmacy who contributed to an Australian undergraduate pharmacy degree program. Results: Most educators viewed the curriculum and their role from a traditional perspective. The educators felt the key purpose of the curriculum was to develop competent pharmacists by providing students with knowledge and skills. There was a limited emphasis on patient-centredness. Conclusion: Whilst educators were focused on developing competent pharmacists through the provision of knowledge and skills, important learning opportunities supporting identity formation may be missed.

The ethics, aesthetics and practical politics of ownership in co-creative media

What is ‘best practice’ when it comes to managing intellectual property rights in participatory media content? As commercial media and entertainment business models have increasingly come to rely upon the networked productivity of end-users (Banks and Humphreys 2008) this question has been framed as a problem of creative labour made all the more precarious by changing employment patterns and work cultures of knowledge-intensive societies and globalising economies (Banks, Gill and Taylor 2014). This paper considers how the problems of ownership are addressed in non-commercial, community-based arts and media contexts. Problems of labour are also manifest in these contexts (for example, reliance on volunteer labour and uncertain economic reward for creative excellence). Nonetheless, managing intellectual property rights in collaborative creative works that are created in community media and arts contexts is no less challenging or complex than in commercial contexts. This paper takes as its focus a particular participatory media practice known as ‘digital storytelling’. The digital storytelling method, formalised by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (CDS) from the mid-1990s, has been internationally adopted and adapted for use in an open-ended variety of community arts, education, health and allied services settings (Hartley and McWilliam 2009; Lambert 2013; Lundby 2008; Thumin 2012). It provides a useful point of departure for thinking about a range of collaborative media production practices that seek to address participation ‘gaps’ (Jenkins 2006). However the outputs of these activities, including digital stories, cannot be fully understood or accurately described as user-generated content. For this reason, digital storytelling is taken here to belong to a category of participatory media activity that has been described as ‘co-creative’ media (Spurgeon 2013) in order to improve understanding of the conditions of mediated and mediatized participation (Couldry 2008). This paper reports on a survey of the actual copyrighting practices of cultural institutions and community-based media arts practitioners that work with digital storytelling and similar participatory content creation methods. This survey finds that although there is a preference for Creative Commons licensing a great variety of approaches are taken to managing intellectual property rights in co-creative media. These range from the use of Creative Commons licences (for example, Lambert 2013, p.193) to retention of full copyrights by storytellers, to retention of certain rights by facilitating organisations (for example, broadcast rights by community radio stations and public service broadcasters), and a range of other shared rights arrangements between professional creative practitioners, the individual storytellers and communities with which they collaborate, media outlets, exhibitors and funders. This paper also considers how aesthetic and ethical considerations shape responses to questions of intellectual property rights in community media arts contexts. For example, embedded in the CDS digital storytelling method is ‘a critique of power and the numerous ways that rank is unconsciously expressed in engagements between classes, races and gender’ (Lambert 117). The CDS method privileges the interests of the storyteller and, through a transformative workshop process, aims to generate original individual stories that, in turn, reflect self-awareness of ‘how much the way we live is scripted by history, by social and cultural norms, by our own unique journey through a contradictory, and at times hostile, world’ (Lambert 118). Such a critical approach is characteristic of co-creative media practices. It extends to a heightened awareness of the risks of ‘story theft’ and the challenges of ownership and informs ideas of ‘best practice’ amongst creative practitioners, teaching artists and community media producers, along with commitments to achieving equitable solutions for all participants in co-creative media practice (for example, Lyons-Reid and Kuddell nd.). Yet, there is surprisingly little written about the challenges of managing intellectual property produced in co-creative media activities. A dialogic sense of ownership in stories has been identified as an indicator of successful digital storytelling practice (Hayes and Matusov 2005) and is helpful to grounding the more abstract claims of empowerment for social participation that are associated with co-creative methods. Contrary to the ‘change from below’ philosophy that underpins much thinking about co-creative media, however, discussions of intellectual property usually focus on how methods such as digital storytelling contribute to the formation of copyright law-compliant subjects, particularly when used in educational settings (for example, Ohler nd.). This also exposes the reliance of co-creative methods on the creative assets storytellers (rather than on the copyrighted materials of the media cultures of storytellers) as a pragmatic response to the constraints that intellectual property right laws impose on the entire category of participatory media. At the level of practical politics, it also becomes apparent that co-creative media practitioners and storytellers located in copyright jurisdictions governed by ‘fair use’ principles have much greater creative flexibility than those located in jurisdictions governed by ‘fair dealing’ principles.

Creative occupations as knowledge practices : innovation and precarity in the creative economy

The ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (herewith CCI) was established with two simple policy objectives. One was to assess anecdotal and boosterish claims about the growth rates of the creative industries, and hence, to measure the size of the creative industries contribution to gross domestic product (GDP). The other was to ascertain the contribution of the creative industries to employment. Preliminary research detailed in Cunningham and Higgs (2009) showed that the existing industrial classifications did not incorporate the terminology of the creative industries, nor did they disaggregate new categories of digital work such as video games. However, we discovered that occupational codes provide a much more fine-grained account of work that would enable us to disaggregate and track economic activity that corresponded to creative industries terminology. Thus was born one major centrepiece of CCI research – the tracking of national occupational codes in pursuit of measuring creative industries policy outcomes. This paper commences with some description of empirical work that investigates creative occupations; however, the real point is to suggest that this type of detailed, occupation-based empirical work has important theoretical potential that has not yet been fully expended (though see Cunningham 2013; Hearn and Bridgstock 2014; Bakhshi, Freeman and Higgs 2013; Hartley and Potts 2014).

Stepping outside the circle : a reflective practice framework for creative facilitators

Stepping Outside the Circle was a practice-based research project focussed on creating a professional reflection framework for creative facilitators working within the community, education, corporate and health and wellbeing sectors. Underpinned by theories of critical reflection, transformative learning, reflexivity and agency, this study explored the potential benefits of multimodal inquiry processes, adapting existing reflective practice models for the unique requirements of creative facilitation contexts. Through application of the key findings from this research, synthesised in a practitioner resource, it is hoped that individual practitioners and creative organisations may develop their understanding of evaluation strategies, self- reflexivity, professional sustainability and practitioner self-care.

Creative Commons Australia and Organization for Transformative Works submission to the Australian Government’s online copyright infringement discussion paper

This submission focuses on the adverse effects that the Government’s proposals are likely to have on the legitimate use of copyright works. Copyright exists to support the production of new expression. Because new expression always builds on existing culture, any extension of copyright protection necessarily also increases the costs of creative expression. As a threshold matter, we do not believe that these further increases to the force of copyright law are justified. In recent years, the balance at the heart of copyright law has tipped too far in the direction of established producers and distributors, and now imposes unnecessary costs on ordinary creators. The available evidence does not support a further increase in the penalties and enforcement mechanisms available under copyright law.