The role of Honours in promoting research literate graduates for, and with, industry

The paper reports on a program that brings together what is known about active learning in design education, that is, learning by doing, and what is known about communities of practice to address a real concern - the lack of take up of Higher Degree by Research programs within in the discipline of design. The report Building Australia's Research Capacity Report (2008) highlights this problem, stating '...it is evident that postgraduate research is in direct competition with the workforce, particularly at the graduate and entry levels, in the current climate of low professional unemployment' (p.87). To meet such calls, Australian Universities have focused on increasing the completion rates of existing Higher Degree by Research candidates. This paper focuses on the role of honours programs as servig two purposes: first to increase the numbers of undergraduate students taking up Higher Degree by Research programs as a way of increasing the numbers of doctoral qualified workers, and second, to produce research literate honours graduates for industry. At the same time literature around research training identifies the vagaries associated with research (Barron & Zeegers, 2002) as one of the barriers faced by Higher Degree by Research students in their research training. This paper looks to understandings generated through communities of practice and Legitimate Peripheral Participation to argue for a model of honours and Higher Degree by Research training that address such vagaries. The model uses collaboration and working with industry and researchers to establish Active Learning experiences - participants with various levels of research expertise working alongside each other in research clusters on industry projects to experience how methods are employed and problems are addresses and solved. The model argues for a staged, deliberate process of drawing newcomers into a given professional field, where they work with increasing more experienced practitioners as a part of specific communities of practice until they themselves become proficient.