“…This is because they often re-enter the academy after a number of years working as practitioners and/or educators in industry and/or teaching settings, sometimes without Honours or Masters qualifications – at least those completed recently – and thus enter a doctoral program with less of a research identity than those in more traditional research disciplines (see Finlayson, 2012; Masson, 2016; Wilson, 2018). A core part of the research training context in these disciplines, then, is the formation of a new identity, that of the ‘practitioner-researcher’, which can – at first – be a struggle for doctoral candidates before such training, hopefully, then becoming liberating and generating a new approach to practice (Batty, 2016; Batty and Sinclair, 2014). Central to this successful experience of research training is the skillset of the supervisory team, who, as Kroll outlines, must perform a myriad of (perhaps impossible) roles in the creative practice space:Like an earth mother, she nurtures her children, managing to give each one enough attention.
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