The uses of literature in three
academic disciplines
Ted Colclough
Jeni Driscoll
Anna Fox
Finance – the nature of the discipline
Applied microeconomics
‘…one of the most quantified and theorized disciplines in the business
curriculum.’
‘Facing an enormously complex real world, we have to have a device
to capture the ‘essence’ of various events…by abstracting from reality
via a theory. A theory is an attempt to give reasons for some observed
regularity among things that are complex and often changing.’
‘…explanations and predictions are the main goals in finance. To this
end, both theoretical analyses and empirical investigations are
necessary… As theories provide guides for empirical studies and
empirical studies provide tests of the assumptions and conclusions of
theories, they are complementary.’ (Chang, 2005)
Finance – a typical task
Testing to what extent a theory holds in the real world.
Structure: theory – data – methodology – significance
‘Sometimes it’s you have to know the data; sometimes it’s you have to
know the techniques; sometimes you have to know the theory;
sometimes you have to know all of them.’
Finance – uses of literature
• Familiarity
• Classification
‘You have to read the existing literature. Once you’re in your comfort
zone in the existing literature, you can then, for example, …classify the
literature according to the assumptions that the various authors make or you
can classify the literature according to the data that they use, the theories
they employ, and that gives you then angles where you can look at either
oversights or omissions or errors… But in order to do this, you have to
have a command of the existing literature. Now there’s two aspects to that
then. One is what’s the kind of theoretical end of the literature saying and
the other is what is the empirical literature saying, so what is the evidence.’
‘They basically go to the library, pull a paper and replicate it and you
hope that they don’t plagiarise the literature survey.’
• Motivation and contribution
‘I would start by motivating what I’m doing in the context of what
has gone before. Quite often I’ll start with a question, OK?... I can
then argue I’m making a contribution to knowledge, so given the
existing weaknesses in the literature, here’s what I’m doing.’
‘If somebody hasn’t done a literature review then they may spend three
or four months reinventing the wheel, right, and there’s nothing in it.
That’s very annoying when you see that going on.’
• Stance
‘I’m an empiricist so typically I will try and let the data tell me what
my stance is and to do anything else would be incorrect. Now, a
theorist may go in with a pre-assumed position, but I wouldn’t want to
establish my stance. That’s known as bias, which is very bad if you’re
doing empirics because you want unbiased estimates.’
‘There’s an almost one hundred percent correlation between ‘in my
opinion’ and low scores. Right? Erm, a student can include their
views but it should be on the basis of the evidence, right, and on the
balance of the arguments in the literature.’
• Critique
‘You never get any critique. In four years here I have seen one
dissertation with any critique.’
Engineering – the nature of the discipline
‘Learning to apply fundamental scientific knowledge to solve problems or
as the basis for the design of new products, processes and systems.
‘I sum it up as … CDIO … conceive, design, implement and operate, so
invent, make, supply, operate and then dispose of at end of life, they’re the
phases of engineering; so from someone’s mind into reality into use and
recycled.’
Engineering – the nature of the discipline
• A core of established science
‘It tends to be the older stuff where there’s consensus.’
• Cutting edge developments on the periphery
‘New stuff [is] being added all the time … some turns out to be unsubstantiated, but most
… [is] just adding to what is the set of tools, techniques, materials that engineers have …’
‘Always at the edges in developmental engineering, at the cutting edge of science … there
will be different camps having different views... ’
Engineering – typical tasks
Writing about
EXPERIMENTS
Writing about DESIGNS
(Product Design Specifications)
IMRD structure:
• Identify a need/opportunity
• Introduction
• Understand the requirements/user needs
• Method
• Generate/explore various concepts
• Results
• Evaluate concepts -> select 1
• Discussion
• Develop/refine the selected design
Engineering - uses of literature
• Familiarity
‘They have to demonstrate as a student that they know the underlying science. Might not
always need to do that as a professional, it’s probably taken as read, but they have to
demonstrate it so that they can get some marks for that.’
• Motivation & contribution
‘So the first type of literature will be the things that establish the sector or problem or
need … not necessarily scientific, might be social science or might be medical or any of the
sectors that engineers serve.’
‘You’d like to think that if they’ve done the scientific research and have come out with
some findings, you’d like to think in their closing sections they would refer back to some
of the literature. They never do.’
Engineering - uses of literature
• Analysis & application
‘They’ve got to put these [sources of information] together. They need to understand
standards [i.e. British standards or international standards], … have to understand … any
[relevant] rules, regulations, laws, policies, procedures … .’
‘The hardest thing for them to get is so-and-so [referring to a source] says that, so-and-so
says that, and so-and-so says that and the way that’s relevant to me is this… .’
Engineering – uses of literature
• Critique & stance
‘… about the design project, they’ve got different design ideas that have come from
within the team and they will critically review those.’
‘[W]here their voice comes in much more is evaluation of their own ideas and their own
developments … and where they justify their route from millions of concepts to one thing
… their interpretation of situation information to create a product.’
‘They do it partly by matrix analysis, concept variant analysis, … where they set the criteria
against which they’re going to measure their ideas, and they weight them … it’s like a
number at the end - it’s that one! But of course it has to be followed up with an
argument. … They have to argue for the selection of concepts. We chose an electric over a
diesel engine for these reasons.’
‘And this is completely new to them. It’s the first time they’ve ever done it in Y2.’
Architecture – the nature of ‘the discipline’
‘…you can't just work in architecture and make buildings in isolation. It
was always the case that architects were working in relation to society,
in relation to their context but in general architecture … in universities
… there's problems with their traditional models.’
‘… the influence of architecture comes from the architecture out to
society it doesn't work the other way round, ok. The content of
architecture, the buildings as well as the goals, the ideas and ideals of a
field are increasingly impacted by an awareness of the social roles,
which is having enormous consequence for architecture and for
dissertations.’
Architecture – the nature of ‘the discipline’
PGT Programme
Qualification specialism
MA Architecture
specialise in architectural design
Master of Architecture
validated by RIBA and prescribed by ARB as a Part II
qualification towards access to the Architectural
Profession in Europe
MSc Building Information Modelling (BIM)
integrated and efficient approach to design and
construction that builds on both architectural
knowledge and technological progress
MSc Digital Integrated Design
technology-mediated design theories, methods and
techniques in Architecture and Urban design… the
integration of digital media in architectural and urban
design
MSc Sustainable Environmental Design in
Architecture (SEDA)
designing for climate change, sustainable architecture,
low carbon technologies and computer modelling of
sustainable environments
Architecture – a typical task ???
studio presentations & critiques
seminar paper abstracts
seminar presentations (to postgraduate students and tutors)
seminar presentations (to wider audience within the School of Architecture)
illustrated architectural journal articles
academic posters
research proposals
dissertation
Architecture – a ‘typical’ task: the dissertation
MA and MSc students have three options:
• A written dissertation (10,000 words)
• Design [thesis type] Project
• Research by Design Project (5,000 words)
Architecture – a ‘typical’ task: the dissertation
Aims:
• to explore an aspect of architecture (and closely related fields, such
as Urban Studies, Planning, Art, Computer Aided Design, etc.)
systematically and in detail, and to present their findings in an
academic way
• to submit a conventional written dissertation OR to submit a design
thesis with supporting documentation on an approved topic or brief
of their choice which responds to current research agendas in the
field of architecture, and in particular the idea of Design as Research
Architecture – a ‘typical’ task: the dissertation
‘Well, because architecture has this sort of funny situation …’
Master of Architecture
fully fledged
MArch
architect
academic
dissertation
?
Architecture – a ‘typical’ task: the dissertation
traditional model
of research
new categories of
scholarship
Boyer & Mitgang (1990)
Architecture – a ‘typical’ task: the dissertation
‘The debate on the relationship between research and design is
continuous and complicated.’
For architectural education one of the key goals ‘set in order to
benefit students was that of a unified profession; seeking closer
collaboration and understanding between the academy and the
architectural profession.’
Piatkowska (2016)
Design activity is sometimes regarded as less scholarly
Boyer & Mitgang (1996)
Architecture – uses of literature
Motivation
• defining the problem to be investigated - requires considerable
thought and a commitment to reading
• an aspect of architecture, history, urbanism, society,
construction, procurement, cities – almost anything that
relates to our built environment … to generate new
understandings, findings, data and interpretations… we want
you to contribute to the body of knowledge, or provide new
interpretations and understandings of the existing body of
knowledge. This will be manifest in different forms
depending on the course you are taking.
Architecture – uses of literature
Contribution
• it is also for the construction of truth, knowledge and
information that might then be applied as or
developed into policy, collections, products, systems,
or simply collated for its own end
Architecture – uses of literature
• Reading is the key event
• research content and research methods
Sources:
• sources/data that have not been previously published; e.g.
interviews, surveys, archival data, correspondence, fieldwork.
You can conduct very insightful surveys, literature reviews and
analysis from existing research/books/datasets
• maps, diagrams and illustrations, timelines, building plans and
photographs
• to produce and then discuss own drawings and surveys
Architecture – uses of literature
Butterfly collecting
• Carefully organise your data and think about how it can be arranged,
catalogued and displayed. I call this bit ‘butterfly collecting’. In
essence you are gathering and cataloguing, putting things into an
order and creating a taxonomy. Some students stop at this point –
but the better scholars continue and try to ‘analyse’ and ‘interpret’
this material – what does it all mean? How does it fit into a larger
canon and body of knowledge? How does it confirm or contradict
how we have previously thought about the
subject/style/person/society?
Architecture – uses of literature
Stance
• ‘My problem is which is your problem …, is to help students do what they
want to do. I don't want to tell them that topic is too complicated I want them
to do what they want to do and to feel happy about it and if I can do it in a
scientific framework, everybody's doing what they want to do.’
Familiarity – skills and knowledge
• ‘I try to get the students to ensure that they’re able to in a dissertation show
that they are skilled in the practical and the grounding roots. The literature
review is important there, ok, because you must provide your students with
the most fundamental literature. You can’t tell them they’re supposed to
read around.’
Conclusions
• nature of the disciplines – hard, soft, pure, applied (Becher and
Trowler, 2001)
• inter/multi-disciplinarity
• social context
• purpose of discipline
nature of the discipline
‘the point I'm trying to make is the very fact that you're doing
these interviews suggest that you’re questioning whether the
disciplines are definitive.’
• sometimes hard to separate out nature of the discipline
and use of sources
Conclusions
• literature / sources / data
• disciplinary knowledge (or lack of) and implications for disciplinespecific EAP
• common criticism from tutors and departments - ‘all description
and no critique’
• what is meant/understood by ‘criticality’?
• the role and use of sources – process and product
• relationship between EAP writing and reading
• assumptions about reading skills and materials
• next steps
References
Becher, T. & Trowler, P.R. (2001) [2nd Ed] Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the
Cultures of Disciplines. Buckingham: OUP.
Boyer, E.L. & Mitgang, L.D. (1990) Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of professoriate. Princeton, NJ:
Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching.
Boyer, E.L. & Mitgang, L.D. (1996) Building community: A new future for architecture education and
practice. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching.
Chang, S.J. (2005) ‘A critical discussion on financial theory: what should we teach and how?’ Journal of
Economics and Finance Education. 4(2) pp 39-48.
Piatkowska (2016) ‘Moving towards competence in teaching architecture: the relationship of research
and design in academia’ Procedia Engineering 161 (2016) 1476 –1481.