Our Program Is

Somewhere in Between:

interdisciplinary, disruptive, transformative, laboratory, rigourous, liminal, useful, process, making, knowing, unconventional, inventive, swamp & kindergarten

Honours is the most exciting and challenging academic experience that has the potential to transform your understanding of yourself and your role in media and communication. Honours allows the best students to participate in series of interdisciplinary research laboratories that explore gnarly questions and wicked problems in modern network ecologies. We will make things that push ideas, artifacts and methods to explore their limits/boundaries. You will develop the skills and capabilities to be agents of change in your fields of interest and practice.

Threading

How to thread things between the labs amongst the students (courtesy of Rachel):

The Lab Themes

The big outcome today are the lab themes. The themes are set, the description still in draft mode.

(insert drumroll)The Themes(/remove drumroll)

Advocacy Lab
The Advocacy Lab provides an opportunity for you to engage with real world problems in the context of community engagement and social issues. You will work in interdisciplinary teams to investigate problems and issues which matter to communities. The lab is an opportunity to facilitate your engagement with sustainable and responsible practice in the communication and media industries.

Critical and creative thinking will be used to enhance your disciplinary knowledge. This course offers you a deep level of engagement with social problems; you may work with community groups, not-for-profit organizations, or industry on real-world problems.

This is a lab where you are able to use your media and communication abilities to transform your, and others, understanding of ethical questions to empower and make a difference.

Slow Lab
The Slow Lab provides an opportunity for you to undertake speculative research and making around the concept of the ‘slow’. You will work in interdisciplinary teams to define, sketch, elaborate upon, unpack and describe how the recent idea of the ‘slow’ may be relevant to media and communication in terms of theory and practice.

This concept of the slow has arisen in reaction to the increased velocity and intensification of contemporary media, communication, manufacturing and consumption. It is concerned with sustainability and the romantic restoration of the ‘human’ within what some characterise as the ‘in’ or ‘posthuman’ of a contemporary knowledge society. You will interrogate the concept of slowness in this lab.

This is a lab where the slow movement will be appropriated to think about slow media, slow technology, and slow communication. You will use your media and communication abilities to consider the role and relevance of the slow in relation to a problem of your choice.

UnFiction Lab
The UnFiction Lab provides a space to investigate, critique and undertake studies in non fiction theory, practice and form. You will work in interdisciplinary teams to deepen your understanding of key issues in factual, documentary and nonfiction research. These issues may include the relation of fiction to nonfiction, the place of creativity and invention in nonfiction, the ethics of documentary, and asks where nonfiction occurs and why.

What is an Honours Lab?

Thanks to Russell Kerr:

What is an Honours Research Lab?
A Research Lab is a transformative space that facilitates dynamic work through the relations between the diverse individuals involved; these interactions produce innovative and creative solutions to key problems in media and communication.

The Research Lab can be thought of as being a creative studio space; part design studio; part kindergarten; part conversation; part laboratory. As a participant of a Research Lab you can expect to give a voice to an identified issue or theme, you will collaborate with team members in a participatory experience, and you will produce research outcomes of relevance to your future career.

You can expect an intensive collaborative environment that expands your understanding of a given subject. You will employ a range of complex skills and research activities to create new solutions in response to a research problem.

Outcomes of the Research Lab will be as diverse as the participants’ skillsets and experiences, they will be interdisciplinary. Your outcomes will be relevant to the research problem and be appropriate to your personal understanding and exploration of the issue or theme you have engaged with. The outcome you create may be different from your own disciplinary practice.

Honours encourages you to approach media and communication research as a disruptive, informed and transformational practice. The laboratory, from the point of view of your disciplinary experience and learning, will be seriously playful, liminal and enabling.

Outline of What a Lab Theme Needs to Do

Some guidelines (chime in for what I’ve missed here please)

1. They cannot be discipline specific
2. They do need to be broad enough to offer content/engagement for all current programs (draw a line from creative writing, through comm design, on to all the b.comm programs, and on to games, music, animation, photography…)
3. They need to be relevant to the School
4. We can innovate – lead – agenda set
5. They need to be ‘teachable’ (there needs to be honours appropriate content to be taught)
6. They need to support a diversity of research outcomes (thesis, project, project via portfolio)
7. Hopefully they have some ‘cool’ quality so that students ‘get’ why doing that topic would be, well, cool

Less specific:

1. Let’s think innovative stuff.
2. Let’s think forward looking (honours knowledge as enabling future knowledge practitioners)
3. Let’s think about what honours should be known for and why

Teaching and Learning (1)

First crack at the teaching and learning experience for honours.

Honours encourages you to approach communications research as a disruptive, informed and transformational practice. The laboratory, from the point of view of your disciplinary experience and learning, will be seriously playful, liminal and enabling.

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.

LTIF (2)

Slightly pared down version of the first draft, with also a one sentence conclusion saying what we actually want to do (always useful when applying for project funds to mention what you might actually do!). It is currently 354 words, they are asking for 300, I’m intending to add 350 and if the system truncates it then I’ll carve it down, otherwise they can just read the lot. Questions for me: do we need to say more at this point about what we would do? How we would do it? Reading the call for proposals we need to do this in the final one, but I don’t think it is necessary at this stage. Opinions?

A new School wide honours program is being developed for 2012. A feature of this program is an interdisciplinary, research driven laboratory model for student engagement, research training and the integration of School research into the curriculum. This laboratory 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 with interdisciplinary research and practice.

However, this raises problems around teaching and learning. These problems derive from the disciplinary mix that the laboratory will need to support and nurture, the learning outcomes that the laboratory needs to achieve and how these may be assessed. To date the use of the laboratory or studio model has been constrained to cohorts containing cognate disciplines. However, within a laboratory 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 laboratory 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 laboratory leader require to be able to manage such a diversity? What, should be assessed within the laboratory? Collaboration? Peer participation and critique? 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 laboratory and not merely a mixed collection of students undertaking individual and divergent research journeys?

A laboratory based honours program has the potential to integrate industry based projects and outcomes within a single laboratory, and to be a model of communications and media education that is international in its impact. To be able to do this properly, and with relevance and rigour in a manner that provides a model that can be applied to other disciplines and programs, is the aim of this project through the development and evaluation of a trial interdisciplinary laboratory with honours candidates in 2010.

LTIF (1)

Jeremy Yuille has proposed we put in an expression of interest for the current Learning and Teaching Investment Fund. He then had the temerity to suggest I do the first rough and dirty draft of it. What follows is it. We need this done and dusted by the end of Friday. As far as I can see we put in an expression of interest and then a much larger document needs to be done by October.

All that follows is for y’all to negotiate/change. If people prefer a googledoc let me know, otherwise use comments here, copy and paste into comments to see where we end up. It is currently too long, and misses the point in a few places, but in my experience much easier to see this when got some words to react with and to.

Project title: Interdisciplary Research Labs in Honours Education: Out of the Silo and into the Swamp.

Project Description (please indicate relevance to selection criteria, max 300 words).

A new School wide honours program is being developed for delivery from 2012. A key feature of this program is the use of an interdisciplinary, research driven laboratory model for student engagement, research training and the integration of School research into the undergraduate curriculum. This laboratory model is innovative in the context of 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 genuinely engage with interdisciplinary research and practice.

However, this model raises a number of important questions around teaching and learning. These problems derive from the disciplinary mix that the laboratory will be required to support and nuture, as well as the sorts of learning outcomes that the laboratory, in itself, needs to achieve and how these may be assessed. Within the laboratory students could come from media, journalism, public relations, communication design, creative writing, music, games and animation, advertising and photography. What sorts of research problems will ‘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 laboratory leader require to be able to manage such a diversity, particularly when their existing training may depend on an individual supervision model? Students in the laboratory will produce work that is examined in the usual way for honours, but how, and what, should be assessed within the laboratory? Collaboration? Peer participation and critique? 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* laboratory and not merely a mixed collection of students undertaking individual and divergent research journeys?

A laboratory based honours program has the potential to integrate industry based projects and outcomes within a single laboratory, and to be a model of communications and media education that is international in its impact. To be able to do this properly, and with relevance and rigour, in a manner that provides a model that can be applied to other disciplines and programs, is the aim of this project.

Teaching Propositions

These are my notes from the meeting, they are some key ideas come BIG wooly words that came out of Rachel and Yoko’s discussion documents and what was said. Think of them as an ideas cloud.

Playful, ludic.
Liminal, the swamp.
Enabling.
Outside, open.
Disruptive.
Transformative.
Laboratory as being research centred.

Student centred models weave through all.