Changes happening at many Australian universities include the establishment of postgraduate ‘for-purpose HDR training Masters degree’ programs with potential to increase opportunities for industry placements and strengthen opportunities for international students, for whom the unique Australian Honours system is unfamiliar (Gelber et al., 2024). This articles examines some of the characteristics of the Australian Honours system, illustrated with examples from recent graduates of the soon to be disestablished Bachelor of Creative Art (Honours) program at the University of South Australia (UniSA), as a means to inform the development of replacement Master of Research (MRes) programs.
In Australia, Honours degrees in the creative arts offer students a unique pathway to research skills acquisition, by providing them with the autonomy to design a bespoke, year-long research project around their personal research interest and disciplinary background. These research projects are frequently framed around students’ lived experiences in a broad range of contexts, opening opportunities for a diversity of creative investigations which may be difficult to replicate through the supervisor-initiated project model familiar to the STEM disciplines.
As Hamilton and Carson assert ‘traditional conventions of supervision are ill-suited to the diverse contexts, mediums and outputs of creative practice’ (2015, p. 1245), compounded by recent foregrounding of improvements to efficiencies in doctoral education models (McKenna & Van Schalkwyk, 2024).
According to a report recently released by The Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH), most students report undertaking Honours for reasons of ‘intellectual interest, curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge’ (Gelber et al., 2024). Honours fulfils several purposes, including greater readiness for professional practice and student self-actualisation, though its primary purpose is intended to be scholarly training for higher degree research. However, Honours programs in Australia have also been criticised for not sufficiently preparing students for the rigours of HDR (McGagh et al, 2016) and for this, and for the internationalisation reasons mentioned above, there is a trend to shift from Honours to MRes. There is a timely need to reflect on the successful components of Honours as means to retaining those features in new programs.
The capacity to choose a topic of study is noted to be popular among students in the DASSH study. In the Bachelor of Creative Art (Honours) program at UniSA, we have encouraged this option for students, observing that it produces a diversity of topics, approaches and studio artefacts providing unique insights across creative arts disciplines.
The images featured in this article illustrate a sample of research projects from the 2024 cohort, covering diverse topics related to queer identity (Figs. 1 & 2), neurodiversity (Fig. 3), cultural assimilation and colonial dispossession (Figs. 4 and 5), nature-human relations (Fig. 6), FIFO worker conditions (Fig. 7) and artistic experimentation within the format of the Honours exegesis itself (Fig. 8). A key commonality across the theses is independent study leading to development of strong authorial voice, this being a key artistic value aligned to the self-actualisation reported across disciplines in the DASSH study. For the creative arts, such self-actualisation appears to us, as educators, to enhance the student’s knowledge production and interest in higher degree research.
Nurturing this culture of diversity requires extensive time in discussion with students to hone their research questions. We look for novelty in the question or topic as an indicator for potential gaps in knowledge valuable at higher levels of postgraduate research. Novelty seems often generated from an initial ambiguity, in which the precise area to interrogate is unknown. Choice of topic is therefore a strategic negotiation between the student and supervisor, with input from the embedded course lecturers. The supervisor, being skilled in disciplinary research, wishes to develop credibility and research value, whereas the student often has interest, familiarity and nascent expertise on an emergent topic, and wishes to maintain and develop that interest.
The creative arts differ fundamentally from STEM disciplines that seek to build convergent, objectively verifiable and replicable knowledge. Artefacts generated through creative arts are conversely interpretive and qualitative, so that divergent subjective perspective is an inherent part of creative arts knowledge production. Embracing pluralism and harnessing diversity in research topics is therefore inherently valuable to creative arts because the more diverse the contributions, the richer the body of knowledge produced. Our proposition is that since the diversity of HDR supervisors, by historical privilege and academic structures, is more limited than within the student cohort, encouraging students to identify their own questions early in their research experience expands the potential diversity of future research, as these students transition towards academic careers. Insofar as this has potential to disrupt hegemonic academic structures and break with historical privilege, we see this as supporting efforts to decolonise higher education.
This diversity also complements the hybrid purposes of the Honours program, being both a pathway to higher degree research and professional practice. Honours graduates offer a range of expertise attractive to employers within increasingly diverse industrial and professional worlds. Such skills include ‘identifying and addressing a complex problem, mastering scholarly skills, conducting independent investigation, and writing at a high intellectual level’, as reported in Horstmanshof & Boyd (2019). Relevance to both employability and research training is a consequence of the inherent hybridity of Honours, fulfilling a need for job readiness leading to professional practice, but also developing expertise towards a research career. If the national trend is for MRes programs to replace Honours, it is cogent for new MRes programs to replicate this hybridity to maintain both pathways for the benefit of industry and academia. If research topic choice is also attractive to students, continuing this option in MRes should encourage student enrolment.
From the student’s perspective, the Honours year is a chance for them to apply the knowledge that they have acquired in their undergraduate program to a novel context or application, while learning the skills required to conduct research. Thereby, the transition from knowledge acquisition to knowledge production addresses a key concern of McGagh et al. (2016). MRes programs, like the Honours programs they replace, must be more than an extended Bachelor qualification if they are to build the next generation of Australian researchers. As part of the continual cycle of improvements to Australian research education, and as Honours programs are reviewed and re-designed, it is crucial that standardised approaches are weighed against the benefits of student-led research projects.
The 2024 UniSA Creative Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) cohort demonstrates the broad diversity of student voices and furthermore evidence the self-actualisation required for higher degree research in the creative arts. The processes and practices through which these exemplars advance knowledge production in their sub-fields, in a more granular level of detail, are the subject of a larger research project in development in which we will collaborate, as co-authors, with the eight graduates whose projects are illustrated in this article.
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Doreen Donovan is an Early Career Researcher at the University of South Australia with a focus on addressing real-world problems through design for sustainability and health, particularly in collaboration with young people and marginalized communities. Her background as creative industry professional spans twenty-six years demonstrating international recognition through selection of her work in premier international juried design exhibitions in London, Singapore, Madrid and Mexico City.
Guy Keulemans is a designer, artist and curator researching repair, reuse and materials for environmental sustainability. An Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia, he is the Team Leader of Craft & Design at the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3). Represented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert in Sydney, he exhibits internationally and has works in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Main image: Tieyuan Zhou, Reconstruction of Personal Identity and the Disappearing Mother Tongue, installation view. Photographer: James Field