Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2013

This mainly visual essay attempts to give a glimpse of the potential reflective book-making has as note-taking through showcasing a variety of the artefacts produced during a number of Writing in Creative Practice workshops. It is interspersed with some of the quotations we use to put this activity into a larger context of making, thinking and reflective practice.

The ‘Patchwork Project’ explored peer assessment and alternative submission of written work on Creative Arts degrees. Art and Design students often experience a tension between the experiential learning of their main subject disciplines and the formal academic outcomes required by their Contextual Studies (theoretical) modules. Their studio practice (e.g. making paintings in Fine Art, garments in Fashion Design or images in Photography), involves working alongside peers and participating in formative group critiques of work in progress. However, Contextual Studies modules have a different mode of pedagogic delivery (the lecture or seminar) and require written outcomes, composed in isolation. Creative Arts students thus often consider writing to be an unwelcome ‘bolt-on’ to their core activity of creative production. This article shows that Creative Arts students who share the stages of composition with each other are better able to engage with writing as a meaning-making process. The project modified R. Winter’s patchwork text model, originally established in Health contexts, to include visual and performative elements, such as an images analysis and a poster presentation. Instead of producing an essay at the end of a Contextual Studies module, a cohort of B.A. (Hons) Fine Art students wrote a number of short pieces of text to be discussed with peers before being redrafted for submission and assessment. The poster presentation patch developed previous investigations into holistic assessment for visual arts students. Participants in the ‘Creative Arts Patchwork Project’ claimed that using a poster to ‘stitch’ the patchwork learning together had helped their learning to ‘go deeper’. This article demonstrates that the combination of a patchwork approach, peer discussion and a strong visual element improved students’ analytical abilities and confidence in their writing voices. The ‘Patchwork Project’ proposes a new way to approach the academic essay on Creative Arts degrees.

This is a personal account of the re-evaluation of an artists’ sketchbook project, which I made during a period of struggle to write an academic Ph.D. thesis in a way that would draw on my creative practice as an artist. The Ph.D. research (for submission January 2014) explores the evaluation of qualitative impact of creativity in community projects, through empirical field trials. Part of this has included the use and development of creative evaluation methods, and an exploration of the issues of interpretation of data which these raise. This article describes how the experience of participating in a Writing-PAD HEA seminar using collage, earlier this year, prompted me to re-examine the personal sketchbook project and make a useful connection between my arts practice and academic writing.

Through reflexivity and its intrinsic multiple interpretations of the ‘image’, collage allows one to find the words to express subjective experience. By a practicing artist searching for a method of enquiry through creative practice that seamlessly merges the making and the textual, this article will outline the narrative of a synthesis of the thinking through making and ongoing reflexivity where collage is used as a form of methodology within a practice based Ph.D.

This article considers how the act of making through embodied activity can enhance levels of knowledge of complex theoretical frameworks. W. G. Sebald’s use of narrative and image in The Emigrants (1993) to conjure up ghosts that reside in our memory of significant places influenced the development of a hand stitched artist book of collaged photographs taken on a final farewell walk. This article examines the journey undertaken to develop the book from the walk over two years ago to the recent binding of the spine and considers the tacit understanding of the theoretical concepts which developed into explicit knowledge through the making of the book.

Reporting on a series of workshops for students and with teachers undertaking professional development, this article shows how one little button can have many potential uses in teaching, particularly for understanding research strategies and writing practice. Referencing a story created around a specific button, the intention is that ideas are raised, which the reader can then interpret and transform into their own areas of practice.

A short addendum to Pat Francis’ report on her button activity – which it was inspired by – this contribution demonstrates how visual analogies can be used to help students visualize ‘hidden’ academic practice. Addressing students, it specifically uses the button to explain the concept of embedding quotations.

The narratives and nomenclature which surround doctoral supervision reflect inherited metaphors of hierarchy. Traditional doctoral theses in the humanities show, in addition, a conservative adherence to certain modes of discourse which serve these inherited narratives that assume a certain fixedness in identity constructions of the ‘supervisor’ and ‘supervisee’, or the ‘supervisor’/’student’; worst of all, perhaps, the ‘master’/‘apprentice’ schema. This article uncovers an alternative approach to the supervisory relationship (via a methodology of poetic inquiry) which aims to dismantle inherited mythologies in the supervisory discourse and places the doctoral student and supervisor as co-collaborators in the act of supervision. Through poetic inquiry, critical incidents in reflective practice can be crystallized, deconstructed and reconstructed in new configurations that reflect more genuine dynamics in the relationship than those accommodated via the traditional models and schemas pertaining to supervisory discourse.

This article is a record of two workshops between a doctoral candidate and her supervisor and their effect on both the student’s reflection of her thesis and also the nature of PhD supervision itself. Techniques from poetics and ‘tactile academia’ formed the basis of the exercises and began a dialogue between supervisor and candidate, placing their texts in colloquy, for example, the poetic vignettes in this paper are the supervisor’s poetic inquiries, crystallized moments, in response to the candidate’s reflection. This exchange presents a more active reality of the supervisory relationship where a student can be simultaneously expert and novice, a supervisor a beginner and officiate, and both participants are co-creators.

Writing in Creative Practice: Towards academic publication workshop

Writing in Creative Practice: Exploring Layers of Meaning, University of Chester, 26 March 2013