Practice Research - Report 1: What is practice research? and Report 2: How can practice research be shared?

Abstract

• Practice research has a history stretching as far back as the earliest human experiments: practice is a method of discovering and sharing new findings about the world that surrounds us. In recent years, scholarly communication has undergone a series of changes that have led to a broadening of the landscape of academic research, due in part to the emergence of practice research in the academy. The formulation and dissemination of practice research affords an important opportunity for researchers in England across all research disciplines, offering a research field that conveys ways of knowing from practice, operating within, across and beyond disciplines in manners that go far beyond traditional research types. In practice research, forms of sensory, tacit and embodied knowledge can be conveyed, and its sharing presents an opportunity for the modernising and revitalising of research communication, uncovering novel dissemination routes in the digital era. In response to the conversations that have arisen across the world surrounding practice research, these reports seek to clarify the debates, discussions and promise of the practice research community in England. These reports: ● provide insights and recommendations to practice researchers, and to the organisations and professionals that support practice research; ● demonstrate that practice research enriches not just higher education, but learning and knowledge acquisition in other contexts including creative industries, scientific settings, non-profit organisations and independent bodies. Practice researchers are discovering new ways of generating and sharing research, embracing non-traditional types of publication. In a world whose day-to-day is rife with mixed-media and non-textual information, it is time for academic research to embrace non-textual media and formats, and the vast ever-developing array of novel communicative technologies that are used in our everyday lives. We have written these reports with the aim of reaching a diverse range of audiences, from students to researchers inside and outside of academia, from research support professionals to senior university research managers, from independent and non profit research organisations to those individuals and committees that weigh and decide policy and funding in future years.