Opening keynote - Carole-Anne Upton & Ifan Shepherd

Weighing it up: Research and the Undergraduate Dissertation in Media and Performing Arts Professor Carole-Anne Upton and  The Dissertation: Skylark or Albatross? Professor Ifan Shepherd

This year’s conference was opened by two keynote speakers drawn from within the University, these were Carole-Anne Upton, Professor of Theatre and Dean of the School of Media and Performing Arts and Ifan Shepherd, Professor of GeoBusiness at Middlesex University, and Director of Professional Practice Programmes in the Business School. They offered us complimentary and contrasting views and reflections on the role of the dissertation and other enquiry based modes, based the on their extensive experience of working with students in Higher Education; Carole-Anne focussed predominantly on undergraduate research and enquiry with Ifan concentrating on practice within the postgraduate area. It was clear that neither of them came to bury the dissertation but in fact, to praise the principles and values that it offered students with some caveats, words of warning and challenges to the audience.


Carole-Anne was concerned with the mystique that surrounded the dissertation with its language often residing in the language of traditional research and the ways that this impacted on both staff and students. She questioned the extent to which undergraduate research could really qualify as research and whether enquiry based learning was a more accurate title for this activity. Another challenge to teachers centred around the need and drive to increasingly support our students through the dissertation process that often meant that successful students continued to be successful but simply acted to identify failing students earlier without necessarily being able to improve their engagement. This in itself challenged the central principle of ‘extended independent enquiry’ that underpins the honours nature of the dissertation. Carole-Anne concluded that the dissertation certainly wasn’t dead but that it is possible overburdened; there is a need for us to be more explicit about its nature and role as a genuine act of research.

Ifan offered us some historical perspectives on the nature of Masters qualifications and the role of the dissertation as a ‘licence to research’, which has brought us to its current and continuing use within both practice and more theoretically driven programmes of study. He drew our attention to the consistent failure rates within Masters dissertations and questioned whether we were complicit in this failure by trying to pack mastery of subject and mastery of research within the confines of one-year Masters programmes. This was compounded by the expectations of originality that had previously been the domain of doctoral study in times gone by. Ifan offered us both sticking plasters and some more radical solutions that might help students’ approach to research; from asking students to evidence the actual impact of their reading on their dissertation rather than the generic literary review to rethinking the relationship between practice as research and the opportunities of being an insider researcher rather than an outsider looking in.

These perspectives on dissertation practices and problems offered a really useful opening to the conference that enabled conference participants to go to their workshop sessions with many of the key issues well and truly ‘outed’, in the words of Nicky Torrance and certainly at the forefront of their minds.

Report by Mike Seignor

Ifan Shepherd - The Dissertation: Skylark or Albatross? from mdxaltc