Practitioner centred methodological approaches to creative media practice research

ABSTRACT

Practitioner-based enquiry (PBE) has been successfully applied as a research methodology to media production projects for undergraduates, honours and doctoral researchers at the University of Newcastle, Australia. PBE incorporates reflective practitioner approaches and extends ethnographic methods by offering a methodology that investigates the subjective experiential perspective of the practitioner-as-researcher. A collective review of these research projects illustrates the robustness of this approach by drawing out similar research findings that point convincingly towards creativity being described as a practice, a process and a system that is internalised by a practitioner.

KEYWORDS:

• Media practice
• methodology
• practitioner-based enquiry
• creativity
• creative process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Prof Susan Kerrigan is a screen production scholar, who specialises in creative practice research methodologies. She is a co-investigator on the Filmmaking Research Network grant, funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, and has held an Australian Research Council Grant investigating the creative industries. Susan has taught into the Media Production courses in the Bachelor of Communication at the University of Newcastle since 2003.

Prof Phillip McIntyre worked creatively for a number of years in the music industry as a songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, music journalist, and video maker before moving into academia. He now researches creativity at the University of Newcastle NSW where he also teaches sound production and media theory. He is the author of Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice (2012) and is chief investigator on an Australian Research Council Grant. See more detail at: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/phillip-mcintyre