An artful becoming: the case for a practice-led research approach to open educational practice research

Within the context of Australian higher education, Open Educational Practice (OEP) requires a collective response from researchers and practitioners to instantiate novel, sustainable, scalable, and evidence-informed educational practices. This article outlines practice-led research's (PLR) role in educational research in open education and its potential to drive transformation and knowledge creation for practice in and through practice itself. As a creative arts methodology, PLR foregrounds practice as the locus of research activities. Practice-led researchers are deeply embedded in the research process, and knowledge production occurs through the generation of artefacts, processes, and techniques. With a focus on real-time making and research, PLR promotes a culture of knowledge production through the active 'doing' of practice within a process-oriented framework. In this paper, OEP is reframed as a creative project, and PLR, with its stress on researcher/practitioner reflexivity, becomes a methodology capable of fostering open educational practices in becoming.