The artistic research teaching employability nexus : expanding the nexus to students

Writing twenty years ago, Neumann (1996) questioned the existence of a nexus between research and teaching roles. Reviewing the literature up until the late-1980s, she asserted that few academics find a nexus because of the privileging of research over teaching. From the 1990s, however, she found the research-teaching nexus to be bi-directional and multi-level, with many students identifying the nexus as an opportunity for scholarly interactions. Since then, the nexus has been confirmed and extended by drawing in further issues such as learning (see Buckley, 2011) and scholarship (see Musthafa & Sajila, 2014). In the arts, the artist academic also incorporates an arts practice. We have argued previously (Bennett, Wright & Blom, 2010) that this inclusion extends the nexus to encompass artistic research and teaching (ART). This short discussion paper retains the focus on the artist academic and further extends the ART nexus through the addition of employability.