Nurturing the research spirit: the ivory tower and the teaching-research nexus in developing early career research

摘要

After 17 years as a school music educator I feel that I am only now commencing my career as a researcher. Whilst teaching I completed my postgraduate studies out of a sense of personal curiosity and a professional desire for challenge, but also with a view to possibly entering the tertiary sector at some stage in the future. The catalyst for that change came as my role became increasingly that of an administrator and human resource manager - labels that removed me further from the areas of teaching, scholarship and inquiry. In my first year as an academic starting the research journey has however proven to be more complex than I thought, and I have entered an environment in which my previous perceptions of the academic ivory tower have been challenged. The need to get “runs on the board” with articles and conferences and to collect data and run research projects within a challenging workload is all symptomatic of this complexity. In this paper I will explore some of the ways in which I have sought to solve this dilemma through optimising the teaching-research nexus.