LTIF (3)

This is what it ended up as in the wash:

Research Becoming a Tacit Knowing — the Honours Studio as an Enabling Interdisciplinary Experience

A School wide honours program is being developed for 2012. A feature of this program is an interdisciplinary, research driven studio model for student engagement, research training and the integration of School research into the curriculum. This studio model is innovative in communication and media education in its desire to align research to research training in the school, in its move away from a traditional humanities ‘solitary’ scholar model, and its desire to engage seriously with interdisciplinary research and practice.

However, this raises problems for teaching and learning due to the disciplinary mix that the studio needs to support and nurture, learning outcomes that the studio needs to achieve and their assessment. To date the use of the studio has been limited to cohorts containing cognate disciplines. However, within our studio students could come from media, journalism, public relations, communication design, creative writing, music, games and animation, advertising and photography. What sorts of research problems does the studio need to frame to ‘work’ for such a diverse group so that legitimate and significant research outcomes can be achieved for all students, in the honours context? What sorts of skills does a studio leader require to be able to manage such a diversity? What, should be assessed within the studio? How can this be done when students may be trained within, and be working from, distinct disciplinary and professional practices? What is required for such an experience to become a research studio and not merely a mixture of students undertaking individual and divergent research journeys? How can a research studio allow research, in all forms to become tacit knowledge for its members?

A studio based honours program has the potential to integrate industry based projects, and to be a model of communication and media education that is international in its impact. The aim of this project is to undertake research in best practice for studio teaching and the evaluation of a trial interdisciplinary studio in 2010 as the first stage to the implementation of a program and school wide studio research model in 2012.