The image of academics isolated in an ivory tower is misleading, claims Alison Meyric Hughes.
As in other professional academic disciplines, arts or cultural management academics involve themselves closely with practitioners and professional bodies, producing a two-way collaboration which informs and benefits both parties.
The origins of cultural management studies may be traced back to the 1970?s and the recognition by the then Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) that arts managers should receive training in their field. This led to ACGB funding and supporting the first arts management course in the country at City University in London, which was the catalyst for the subsequent culture of collaboration that exists between arts practitioners and educators in the sector today. Collaboration takes place at various levels and through a range of activities.
Research
Academics, sometimes working with postgraduate students, take on significant research of and for the sector, working with the Government or other agencies as in the case of the Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001, commissioned by the Department for Culture Media and Sport and undertaken by the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University. Such research, breaks new ground, creates new avenues for debate in the sector as a whole and stimulates fresh thinking within arts organisations. Students at all levels, and particularly postgraduates, also research organisational practice and policy for course work and dissertations. This involves visiting arts organisations, meeting people who run them, sometimes attending events and entering into a dialogue with practitioners about why and how an organisation is run. This interaction benefits not only the students? research but also the organisations themselves, who often do not have time to reflect or research their own activities.
Conferences are yet another means by which academics become directly involved with cultural management. The exchange of ideas through giving and hearing papers and participating in debate, often at international level, involves both practitioners and academics, all of whom have researched issues pertinent to cultural policy and management. The division I make between the two fields, academics and practitioners, often seems invisible at when both sides meet and debate. It is not always the academics who choose to research the theoretical aspects of cultural management or the practitioners who write about practice.
Teaching and Learning
Contributions from practitioners to classroom learning, ranging from regular lectures, guest lectures and seminars to workshops, are common practice at many university departments of cultural management and sometimes an integral part of the syllabus. This type of interaction is a stimulating and useful exchange for both parties; the students gain from hearing directly about current practice and debate, while the visitors from the sector enjoy discussing policy-making and other issues with groups of postgraduate and post-experience students. Students also enjoy and benefit from visits to organisations to discover what goes on ?back stage? and meet those who run the organisation. Postgraduate students will often have experience in the sector, but will not necessarily have had the time or opportunity to meet many of the movers and shakers, to network or to debate current issues with them.
Work placements are perhaps the most significant way for students to understand how organisations and practitioners operate in a fast changing sector, by experiencing at first hand the theory already studied as part of the curriculum. Placements involve close collaboration and trust between all three partners - students, their host organisations and the university ? and if carefully arranged and monitored by both the university and the arts organisation, are a valuable tool for learning by experience. The host organisation benefits as much as the students, acquiring a committed and responsible ?extra pair of hands? (as they often put it) to undertake a substantial project within the organisation. Through working on agreed projects, students gain experience in new fields, sometimes abroad, and discover and develop areas in which they would like to work. Importantly, placements can give those already in employment the opportunity, working with a mentor, to hone new skills and develop their potential.
Unsurprisingly, university students sometimes believe that a work placement will lead directly to employment with the organisation to which they are attached and this can prove to be the case. More often, however, the benefits are indirect and students subsequently secure full-time employment through the contacts they have made on their placements. Arts practitioners who take students on work placements are generous with their time and energy, offering guidance and often helping students in their future plans. A high percentage of graduates from courses in cultural management find employment in the sector, and in this way they form another link between their organisations and the universities at which they have studied. It is most rewarding of all when my former students host work placements for current students. Then the collaboration has come full circle.
Other activities
Academics also play an important part in the cultural sector, as consultants to organisations or as Board members, allowing for an exchange of information and expertise. Whether as consultants or Board members, academics are able to put their over-arching knowledge of the sector as a whole to good use, suggesting new perspectives and solutions to practitioners and their organisations. At the same time, an academic?s grasp of the day-to-day problems of running a cultural organisation is renewed by this form of close interaction with practitioners.
Perhaps the most important element in academic/practitioner collaboration, is, from my standpoint as an academic, getting close to the art and working with those generous and committed people who make it happen.
Alison Meyric Hughes is Course Director of the Post Graduate Diploma in Cultural Management at City University t: 020 7040 8751