Capturing creative practice

This paper will map the initial research surrounding capturing creative practice for the improvement of supervision and learning experiences in higher degree creative arts research in the School of Communications and Arts and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University. Despite differences in what constitutes ‘practice’ across creative disciplines, the difficulties in representing practice-led research processes in an academic context are shared. Through interviews and focus groups, this research explored how the failure to capture the creative process impacts on supervision and learning experiences for creative arts Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidates and their supervisors. One of the biggest challenges for supervisors of creative arts HDR candidates is providing students with guidance on how to document the tacit knowledge that informs and underpins their creative process. As supervisors of HDR candidates in the creative arts at ECU, we see the problems that arise when key aspects of the creative process cannot be written down. The first aim of this research was to gather more concrete data on how the failure to document tacit knowledge in creative research processes can impact on supervision and learning experiences. This data was gathered from interviews with a selection of creative arts HDR supervisors and focus groups with HDR candidates at ECU