Baking the Cake and Decorating it at the Same Time? Reflections on Learning and Teaching in an Undergraduate Dissertation Module in the Social Sciences
This article presents a practice-based reflection on teaching dissertation modules, based on the author’s experience of writing a dissertation, and then leading modules in social-science contexts at three different UK higher-education institutions and supervising well over a hundred dissertations ov...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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De Montfort University
2025-06-01
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| Series: | Studies in Empowering Education |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://account.see.demontfortuniversitypress.org/index.php/dmu-j-gpajepr/article/view/65 |
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| Summary: | This article presents a practice-based reflection on teaching dissertation modules, based on the author’s experience of writing a dissertation, and then leading modules in social-science contexts at three different UK higher-education institutions and supervising well over a hundred dissertations over a fifteen-year period. Unlike other modules, the dissertation module seems to be uniquely pre-occupied with teaching students the How (preferably accompanied by a bit of the Why) rather than the What. Effectively, dissertation modules tend to teach students how to assemble their dissertations for submission. The scheduling of teaching sessions may reflect the recursive/iterative non-linearity of the writing process, but students do not necessarily understand the rationale for this, namely the difference and relationship between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation. Hence, the allegorical analogy of the dissertation module as a course in cake-decorating. In order to decorate the cake, you will have to bake it first – but in reality, we expect our students to do both at the same time, which presents a challenge to them. This reflective piece applies the 5R framework of reporting, responding, relating, reasoning and reconstructing to the author’s experience of supervising undergraduate dissertations and leading dissertation modules. Based on this reflection, the article concludes with recommendations on encouraging students’ conceptual and theoretical understanding, awareness of different learning needs, learning from communicative failures, creating opportunities for developing intellectual craftspersonship as well as co-creating analogies and moving through dialectical shifts with students. It argues for integrating these into dissertation modules to improve the dissertation as process and product. |
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| ISSN: | 2977-4748 |