The art world and the academic world have lived side by side for centuries. We are now at a point in time when these two worlds meet, where arts and art are found in academic institutions, and where artistic research and visual methodologies make headway into the protected sphere of scientific knowledge.

In this paper-presentation I am drawing on some results of a Research Council project “Performing Knowledge. A Project to Improve Knowledge in Higher Education through a Double Perspective; Theory and Performance”. The aim of which is to examine how different kinds of knowledge appear in learning processes and student’s BA-dissertations when focus is on integration of theory and practice. Specifically, I will discuss a three-year case-study at the School of Arts and Communication, (K3), Malmö University, which has been striving towards giving students threefold competence: critical-reflexive, craftsmanship and aesthetic. A semester-long exam-project is meant to make students integrate a traditional academic dissertation with a (equally traditional) practiced-based work in arts or design.

I will in this paper-presentation discuss the nature of this “integration”, the in-between space between theory and practice; the “and”. I aim to show how the integration of the seemingly divergent practices of academic and artistic work has increased the quality of exam-projects and strengthened alumni-student’s professional roles. I want, thus, to discuss what happens when students experience the and.

My theoretical point of departure is thoughts on learning by doing (Dewey; 1916; 1927), the reflexive practitioner (Schön, 1987), research on visual culture (eg Pink, 2007), and Bourdieu’s (1988; 1999) concepts doxa and hexis. 

The methods I used were questionnaires and interviews made with three cohorts of media-students, alumni-students and lectures, as well as textual-analysis of the finished exam-works, and assessment-criteria.

The result of the study show that there are gaps between idealised educational policies and how they work in reality, gaps which creates cultural conflicts between members of staff from different disciplines. These lectures, furthermore, have little actual understanding and experience of working in the in-between-spaces. Results further show that students, on the other hand, have clear understandings and embodied knowledge of what integration of these practices is, and the usefulness of them in their future work-situations. Students learn by doing; they have worked with double perspective and thus have a greater understanding of how and why. Indeed, alumni-students argue that learning to work in-between, with the and, has been imperative for their professional roles.