Transitions: Critical thresholds in the creative and performing arts

 by Calvin Taylor,

School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds

From the Editorial for the AHHE Special Double Issue: Transitions: Critical thresholds in the creative and performing arts vol 12 (2-3) 2013 http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/12/2-3.toc

The Creative and Performing Arts have, in recent decades, both increased in scope and size within Higher Education and emerged as a desirable student experience, a location for innovative research, and more recently, a focus for debates about how Higher Education interacts with wider publics and communities through the prisms of public engagement, access and knowledge exchange. Whilst the admission of the creative and performing arts to the academy has taken place at different historical moments and at different rates, they now collectively represent an impressive and dynamic component of university life, attracting students, securing research investment and significantly adding to the cultural, social and economic life of their host localities and beyond.

With admission and establishment come new priorities, concerns and interests – both for the academic community within the creative and performing arts, but also for university managements, higher education funders and wider public stakeholders. Around the world questions of value-for-money, graduate employability, economic and social return on research investment and the shape, size and structure of university funding are placing all disciplines under pressure to address questions about their value and contribution in historically new and sharper ways. Disciplinary reflexivity now has to find new ways, and possibly even new languages, with which to engage these agendas. In this Special Issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education we present a selection of papers and reports under the rubric of ‘Transitions – Critical Thresholds in the Creative and Performing Arts’; these exhibit how some areas of the creative and performing arts are exercising precisely this sense of disciplinary reflexivity. In this context ‘transitions’ encompasses moments of passage between important domains and statuses: for example, the movement from compulsory to post-compulsory education for the intending student of the creative and performing arts; the complex interchange between disciplinary education and training and transferability; the subsequent passage from university to the world of professional practice; and the challenges faced by practitioners engaging with research (and vice versa) and of the two-way passage of knowledge between the academy and professional practice. It is in these contexts that questions of value and contribution and the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of discipline and academic organisation come into sharp relief. In each case deeply held prior norms, values and expectations may be subject to interrogation and challenge, with important consequences not only for educational and career development, for example, but for the complex relationship between personal, creative and professional identity for staff, students and practitioners. New expectations have to be negotiated, with consequent implications in many cases for personal purpose, professional direction and sense of belonging.