Academic project designs and methods: From professional development to critical and creative practice

Academic project designs and methods: From professional development to critical and creative practice is the first textbook of its kind to address an important element or shift in fields such as education, arts, social sciences, and humanities. For many years, university professional and non-professional programmes have been moving away from an exclusive focus on traditional academic manuscript-based graduate theses towards practical, creative, and/or critically self-reflective, academic non-traditional non-thesis projects. Using the term project throughout this book is important as it recognizes and legitimizes the difference yet equal value of these alternative academic practices. The benefits of academic projects to students are many. They can be useful for students’ existing or future careers (e.g., workshop design, website creation, student leadership training curriculum); allow greater flexibility for highly imaginative and arts-based skill sets or work (e.g., zines, community mapping, visual learning materials, exhibitions or installations); or provide textual and visual analysis which is responsive to contemporary or working contexts (e.g., social media analysis, museum content explorations, policy analysis). While academic projects employ different structures to traditional or normative theses —and therefore offer different uses and values to graduate students—they are equally legitimate and important forms of scholarship.

Other Information

Editors: Darlene E. Clover, Kathy Sanford and Willow Samara Allen
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ca/
See book on publisher's website: Academic project designs and methods: From professional development to critical and creative practice (uvic.ca)