Research is broadly conceived in this course as a pattern of practices in which the major agencies which contribute to the research process are perceived as a mutually dependent relation. This course aims to introduce students to the agencies of investigative practice in the humanities and social sciences and to an understanding of their role in the validation, analysis and interpretation of content within the domains of art, design and education. While practices of research in art, design and education vary widely in their instrumental and political significance it is nevertheless the goal of this course to enable students, through the analysis of exemplars of research, to rehearse these practices in a manner consistent with an apprenticeship model of learning. In particular students will be able to integrate and apply systematically key agencies of research practice in art, design and education including - the role of explanatory theory, the functional stance of the researcher, the constraints imposed by art as the object of investigation, the use of nomothetic and ideographic methods, and the conventions of proposal writing.