Some Thick Description Around Course Guides

Karen Trist made some excellent comments about the Part A course guides, but we did not have the opportunity to discuss them in a meeting. As they are finalising editing I tried to address them via a long, awkward email to the working group:

Finalising Part As for (hopefully) academic approval. Remember, these can be changed in future if a) they seem wrong b) aren’t working c) don’t reflect what actually happens or needs to happen for the subject to be successful.

Karen has made some comments, some of which I’m implementing, others I’m leaving as a) I don’t think they need to be in a part A (they should be in Part B), or they introduce distinctions that I think the program is wanting not to hypostatise. So I’ll respond here, so we all know what the thinking is, you can respond if you wish (but I do need these locked off tomorrow afternoon), and it keeps us on similar page. Finally, thanks Karen for picking up grammatical errors, ambiguities etc. All included and much appreciated.

Research Lab One.
It currently says
“The themes will be general enough to provide engagement for your disciplinary area, and focussed enough to provide a pathway and focus for your research.”
Karen’s comment is “How?”

Answer: not certain yet, so do not want to say as Part A’s are writ in stone and we do not want to be locked in. However, this is the role of the research leader for each laboratory, and in the context of the conversations we’ve been having we have some scenarios that model this. A lab might be with an industry partner, in which case the answer might be different to one that is based on a topic (‘sustainability’, ‘China’, ‘social media’ for example). As we’ve discussed, the biggest question *at the start* will probably be in identifying a) what the first two themes should be and b) who is best equipped to be able to teach them.

Research Lab Two.
This talks about how outcomes need to relate to the lab theme, and it will also concentrate on your honours outcomes.
Karen’s comment is wondering about how these two things can be reconciled.
Karen also points out that two learning outcomes are pretty much identical – one is about sustained investigation, the second emphasises writing.
Karen also has question about overlap and relationship to the research strategies course in relation to this lab, and if majority of work in lab two is on project.

Answer: much like for Research Lab One. Varies depending on theme/topic of the lab, but any individual honours project needs to engage with the theme of the lab. The lab leader, and supervisor, need to be involved here, and it requires conversation, scaffolding, etc. To some extent students are losing their traditional ability to nominate anything for honours, in the same way that PhD students have lost that ability (their proposals must align with uni/school research priorities). We are doing the same thing, as well as building capability within the students, staff and school by ensuring outcomes that ‘cluster’ around a common theme.

In relation to learning outcomes, happy to get more comments here. I’m aware that some practices/students are quite capable of a sustained investigation without feeling the need to actually write anything. I was trying to indicate two outcomes where being able to write about your practice is not necessarily the same thing as being able to investigate/research *through* your practice, but both are important learning outcomes. If this is not clear to y’all please yell now. (Well, it obviously isn’t clear enough so will definitely reword this, but at the moment will keep the distinction unless clear that unnecessary.)

The relation of lab 2 to research strategies is that in semester 1 the strategy course explicitly investigates how to do the honours task (thesis/project) in terms of approaches/methods. It should also cover a pile of research practice nuts and bolts – academic style, citation, bibliographic management, finding stuff, etc. It should also introduce some ideas about disciplinary practice (ie what is a disciplinary practice, what does it look/feel like) and knowledge. In lab 2 I would hope that students are largely only doing their research project. We are trying to structure it so that in practice their entire enrolment activity in sem 2 is making.

Research Practice One
Currently says as an outcome:
“developed and implemented a range of applied research activities relevant to your research project, including undertaking independent research” And in learning activities section that “The main activities will be finding references and resources, reading or viewing them, compiling notes, and maintaining an appropriate bibliography.”

Karen points out no explicit mention of practice/doing/producing artefacts. Also that the activities discussion has no mention of making.

Answer: No. Once we say ‘artefact’ it gets interpreted (particularly by those approving) as only about project based research. A thesis Is an artefact, but most don’t think about it in that way. I also regard writing a thesis as (if you like) a practice where writing and thinking theoretically are your material substrate. But if we write guides that make a distinction, either way, both ways, in relation to practice and thesis we are instituting that difference immediately into our documentation and method. We don’t want this difference. All make, in different forms, and all research is applied. The interdisciplinary nature of the honours we are building is that we are all researchers. We use different means, we produce different outcomes, some may intersect, some won’t, but rather than discussing differences I am taking a deliberate pedagogical view of approaching honours as what everyone has in common, and this is the basis for the teaching and learning and its experience. And what we all have in common is a “project” (a thing that expresses knowledge), “applied research” (thought and action towards realising a thing), and “independent research” (that we will learn how and why we should do this in and for ourselves and our experience of this will be different and *this* difference is significant).

This guide is for semester 1, where students are not expected to make anything in this subject – it is just an allocation of time for them to do a lot of reading, looking, finding, listening – [insert your relevant practice], which is also a reason not to nominate forms for outcomes. It will be pass/fail only as it is research only subject.

in relation to learning activities will rewrite, but in semester one all students should be doing this, regardless of discipline/practice. Semester 2 is too late for a canonical/basic bibliography of your key influencers/thinkers and certainly too late to be looking at other work that will influence what you do. This is the case for those making and for those writing a thesis. I will make it clearer, but as example. If I were a creative writing student this is when I would be reading those authors who a) may have written similar stories to what I intend to do b) used a style I am interested in c) ditto for genre. This list is a bibliography. This is where I would also be finding all I could about (for example) the activity of creative writing and critical commentary on same. Replace terms for film makers, etc but semester one is building ‘literacy’ and that means you need a bibliography and notes and filmography, etc.