?
PRACTICE AS RESEARCH: CREATIVE AND RESEARCH PRACTICE IN THE FORMAT OF POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION
The article focuses on much-discussed format “Practice as Research” (PaR). Practice as research has recently not only become an object of study in foreign universities, but attracted close attention of Russian scholars as well. Specialists in various spheres of arts and humanities convincingly prove the necessity of such creative practice format in performance, theatre, dance and contemporary art. Practice as research includes different modes and ways of representing applied and designed art products. Today the figure of practising researcher is subject of much argument and debate, because creative practice as art research method is an innovative educational model. Assessment of practical research, as well as required amount of theoretical, purely scholarly and creative material, is currently another difficult issue. Practice-oriented methodology and criteria of assessment in case of practice as research provoke animated discussion. In teaching arts and humanities the situation is further complicated by the fact that practice-bound research has for a long time been described as field studies or practical experiments in medicine, design and engineering. In HSE Doctoral School of Arts and Design creative practice in contemporary art and design has recently attracted much attention, because today the practical focus of visual studies is the main track in BA and MA educational programmes. The new vision of art as simultaneously practice and research might shed light on numerous subjects, including cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc. That is why this article insists on the interdisciplinarity of such studies. First and foremost, we reflect on art practice as a sphere of academic research and on the new experience of postgraduate education. We try to sum up the experience of European educational programmes, expand the scope of methodological approaches and present the original view. Practice and research have long become inseparable in humanities; design seminars and creative artefacts representation are new models in modern art and design. Contemporary education in Russia is only beginning to probe the new territory, and in this respect our collective work on the innovative format is aimed at analysing foreign experience and pointing the necessity to promote new educational technologies for postgraduate students. The habitus of practice as research is such that practice-based research rises the questions concerning forms of critical activity and meaningful parameters of a creative artefact, as well as documenting research materials. The given research problem along with practice demonstrates the originality of research and extends the boundaries of the research field, introducing the hybrid methodology of assessing the creative project and critical discourse. The task of this article is to outline the problem under discussion, analyse the data referring to the innovative academic field, and present the key strata of the new educational format “Practice as Research”.