The event was open to all creative practice researchers (and anyone with an interest in the field), but we also invited colleagues from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Research Data Commons and data and analytics providers, as well as university leaders from across Australia and New Zealand. We received over 200 registrations for the event and over 100 attendees on the day.
The ERA Transition Working Group made a recommendation in one fo their final publications – ARC submission to the Interim Report of the Australian Universities Accord (2022)– that the next important step in their review was to have ‘significant sector consultation’. The DDCA wanted to create a space for this kind of consultation, to enable conversations that would support further work in the direction of realising both the stated aspirations and aims expressed in the ERA Review 2021, as well as sector and government concerns (See Statement of Expectations from the Minister, 2022) around the labour of achieving this task.
The DDCA recognises that, whilst there is a wealth of knowledge and experience in the creative practice research community, there is a dearth of formal resources that is readily available to the ARC that can properly inform the architects of the new models for evaluation and assessment of creative practice research.
The forum, and this consequent publication, is our first (of hopefully many) offerings toward the creation and sharing of the most current and informed thinking about how to enable creative practice research to thrive within the university system. We think it is crucial to have collective and cross-disciplinary effort to achieve models of assessment and evaluation that are not onerous, that are fair and that ultimately enable good research.
The ways in which creative practice research participates in philosophical, social, creative, political, intellectual (and more) spaces has developed rapidly over the last couple of decades. There’s a lot of good literature evidencing this maturity and complexity in practice. But the literature on how to evaluate and assess this work has not evolved at the same pace. This conversation needs to develop in concert with the changing agendas and demands of industry, government and university.
Why this matters is: we have seen the gap between the development of the disciplines and effective ways of doing the administration around the research. This has affected a range of things: from people’s career progression, to the further development of the disciplines and potential for collaboration, to the working environments and research cultures across universities.
Unevenness is a key issue which the ERA + EI reviews (2020-2021) exposed: between disciplines and the methods of ranking; between peer-review and data-driven metrics; between peer-review reports.
The stated renewed aspirations and intentions for ERA (in the 2021 review which instigated the current ‘pause’) can be said to be noble but it’s not entirely clear how we are going to arrive at these aspirations (and I’m not only speaking about the ‘labour’ of it). The path is certainly clearer for the citation-based, and therefore data-driven disciplines – and this is the direction implied by the Minister, though this approach also comes with challenges (this will need to be the subject of another discussion) – but this is not so for the peer-review disciplines, such as creative practice research. The forum, and hopefully a series of forums, is our attempt to fill in some of these gaps, to build the literature, to step out possible paths to arriving at a model that has parity across disciplines.
To facilitate an informed discussion, we asked attendees to read the Pre-forum material ahead of the event which sought to bring everyone up to speed on the reviews and main issues and recommendations arising out of those reviews. We came up with five areas where parity needed to be addressed. We invited four speakers from the DDCA Board plus one other expert to speak for five minutes on one of the topics as a way to offer up some provocations and key issues that needed to be considered. Following the presentations we invited the attendees to engage in an open discussion.
This edition of Creative Matters includes the five presentations:
Mia Lindgren – on the topic of creative practice research and university cultures – queries the use of the prefix ‘non’ in NTRO (see also Knowles 2023). She discusses how an expansion of the definition of ‘excellence’ may strengthen the ways in which creative outputs build bridges between academe and the wider society and foster stronger collaborations across university, government, industry and community.
Jessica Wilkinson – on the topic of Parity in ERA submissions across universities – looks at the disparity between submissions that is quite widely reported. She questions whether, given the labour-intensive process and the potentially incommensurable relationship between academic and creative knowledges, we can extract ourselves from a metric system of evaluation altogether.
Craig Batty – on the topic of reviewer training and guidelines – draws our attention to different kinds of knowledges generated in creative practice research and proposes that we cannot evaluate them according to the same criteria. He proposes a national and standardised dataset which would promote parity within creative practice research.
Beata Batorowicz – on the topic of research and industry success – looks at the tensions between industry and academia due to their different value systems and measures of success – such as commercial viability versus academic merit. But could we see these ‘tensions’ as valuable to nurturing a broader cultural ecology?
David Cross – on the topic of world standards – addresses the metric of ‘world standard’ (against which the entire exercise hinges) and asks whether this is a useful or meaningful – or even definable – category.
You can read the summary of the main discussion points that followed the presentations, both ‘on mic’ and in ‘the chat’. For more nuance (and less unintended interpretive valence) I do encourage you to watch the recording of the forum here.
Interestingly, what emerged, when the floor was open for discussion, were matters adjacent to the question of evaluation and assessment which signalled a need for another forum that focussed other issues in greater depth. We aim to hold the next forum on another key issue in 2025.
Following the forum we invited contributions to this edition on the key topics, including our peak body members:
Veronika Kelly and Charles Robb for ACUADS propose a more nuanced approach to assessment based on criteria commonly used in PhD examination processes.
Julia Prendergast and Jen Webb for AAWP do a temperature check on the state of things and consider ways of thriving within the sometimes-stormy climates we find ourselves.
Susan Kerrigan for ASPERA speaks to the importance of disciplinary peak bodies participating in the creation of models of assessment.
Cat Hope considers why scholarly recognition for the so called ‘non traditional research output’ (NTRO) is in decline.
Charles Robb proposes how we might rescue creative arts research in Australian universities.
Andrea Rassell and Jo Pollitt consider the primacy of making visible creative practice methodologies for external assessors.
Craig Batty and myself propose a new project to shore up the work that has been done over the past 30 or so years of writing about the field.
We hope this edition continues to generate further discussion. Send thoughts to editor@ddca.edu.au.