TEXT Special Issue Number 6 - Supervising the Creative Arts Research Higher Degree: Towards Best Practice

Abstract

This special issue of TEXT responds to the challenges faced by supervisors in the creative arts today. It identifies and investigates aspects of best practice in the supervision of research higher degrees in the creative arts internationally, and brings together diverse experiences and perspectives to give an overview of contemporary practice. One of our aims has been to present this range of voices in order to prompt further discussion and scholarship in this area of enquiry. We therefore invited supervisors, examiners, educational researchers and others involved in developing and supporting creative arts higher degree programs to contribute to this issue, and have been able to include authors from the UK and Australia, in practice-based fields including writing, and the visual and performing arts (dance and music), as well as discussions of research higher degree supervision from cross-disciplinary perspectives. Some of the resulting themes that emerge in this collection are also prominent in the scholarly literature on RHD supervision more generally. These are, however, supplemented in this selection of articles by themes arising from the distinctiveness of RHDs in the creative arts; that is, those that follow the creative work plus dissertation model - the latter is widely known as an 'exegesis' in Australia - and that are conceived of as 'practice-led' (although Biggs and Buchler constructively prompt us to move beyond the practice-based/non-practice-based divide to consider, instead, the notion of relevance within the research community).