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School of Design Technology
Cultural and Historical Studies
Guidelines for Contextualising Your
Practice Extended Essay
2022-23
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These guidelines are designed to help you through the process of carrying out research and
writing the extended essay, providing advice on the organisation and structure of your
writing, and the presentation of your work for submission.
Contextualising Your Practice is a 20-credit unit, which is one of three units you will study in
your final year. It counts towards your final degree classification.
The Assessment Brief and Scheme of Work for Contextualising Your Practice is available on
the CYP Moodle site.
ASSESSMENT
Summative assessment: 4,500 word extended essay.
See the Assessment Brief for your specific unit regarding due dates and submission
requirements.
Marking process
Your extended essay will be assessed by your tutor or another CHS tutor. A sample of
essays will be internally moderated by CHS staff.
The External Examiner will look at a sample of work in line with the UAL External Examiner
Regulations.
All grades are provisional until ratified by the End-of-Year Examination Board.
For UAL Assessment Criteria:
Key information on Assessment Regulations, including the University Marking Scale and the
Assessment Criteria, how to submit work, and what happens if you fail an assessment:
https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/academic-regulations/course-regulations/assessment
A good CYP Essay should include:
a well-defined, focussed area of study
clear research question(s) that are possible to answer in a 4,500-word essay
(state these in your introduction)
a critical approach that considers social, political and cultural debates around
the topic
a focused investigation of individually chosen primary source material
clear links between the academic literature you explore and your primary
source material – you need to analyse and interpret your primary sources
using theoretical ideas and concepts and use these as ‘evidence’ for your
discussion
a brief explanation of your choice of research methods
a thorough engagement with relevant academic literature
writing that is structured, clear and concise, and that engages with the
research questions
your essay should be presented using appropriate academic conventions –
i.e. Harvard referencing and a bibliography.
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Common problems which lead to a low grade in an essay are:
Academic misconduct (see section below)
Under (or over) the word count
Unclear research questions which lack focus or are too broad to be addressed
in 4,500-words
Work that is under-researched (ie remains opinion based, without evidence
from academic reading and primary sources)
Lack of relevant primary source material (or lack of evidence of primary
research)
Lack of detailed engagement with academic literature
Failure to make connections between the primary and the secondary research
Work that is mainly descriptive rather than analytical
Work that is poorly structured
Work that is not referenced
ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT
Academic misconduct refers to any form of academic cheating, such as plagiarism
(not acknowledging the source of your information), using essay writing services or
using text spinners and is a very serious charge and may have significant
consequences for you and your degree. UAL guidance on Academic Misconduct can
be found at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/academic-regulations/student_x005f regulations/referencing-and-academic-misconduct
Do not be tempted to do any of the above. Your tutor and/ or one of the other
markers will be an expert in the field and will be fully aware of the literature. Your
work will also be submitted through TurnItIn UK, a digital platform that checks the
originality of texts.
Do not commission or ask anyone to write your work or undertake research for you.
You must submit original work of your own.
You should acknowledge someone else’s work using the correct Harvard citation
style and give credit where it is due. This is only fair to the author whose ideas you
are working with and it also demonstrates to your tutor that you are familiar with the
literature and have thoroughly researched your topic, which is a requirement of the
extended essay.
Self-plagiarism / submitting the same piece of work for more than one
assignment.
It is important to understand that “Deliberately submitting the same piece of work for
assessment for more than one assignment” is classed as Academic Misconduct at
UAL as you have already received academic credit for the work. Therefore, you
must not resubmit work, in whole or in part, for another unit if the work has already
been assessed either at UAL, or elsewhere, for academic credit or an award.
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Tips for avoiding ‘unintentional’ plagiarism
Do not cut and paste from the Internet
Do not enlist the services of another student or organisation to write your
essay for you or undertake research on your behalf
Do not use a text or word spinning service
Fully reference your notes as you go, including noting page numbers when
you intend to quote
Be careful when paraphrasing an author’s words – you need to reference
ideas not just direct quotation
Use several sources in your discussion – this minimises the reliance on any
one author and reduces the risk of accidentally leaving passages
unreferenced
Seek advice from Academic Support if you are unsure
Proof Reading
A great way to check if your writing is clear and ‘flows’ well is to ask a friend to read it
over. This can be a useful part of the editing process, although please note that if
you receive any support, you must explicitly acknowledge and outline this
contribution in your acknowledgements.
However, there is a difference between having someone look over your draft and
having someone make substantive suggestions, edits, improvements to, and re writes of your work. As such, you are not permitted to engage the services of a
professional proof reader as this may be subject to Academic Misconduct and/or be
taken into account in the marking of your essay. You are therefore advised to make
use of services offered by the UAL only. A student with learning difficulties may have
a provision for proof reading in their Individual Support Agreement (ISA), also
provided by an approved UAL service (i.e. academic support tutors).
RESEARCH ETHICS
It is the responsibility of students to conduct their research in line with the UAL Code of
Practice for Educational Ethics. The guiding principles of this Code are respect for
persons, justice, and beneficence; these constitute a systematic regard for the rights and
interests of others in the full range of student relationships and activities.
RESEARCH INVOLVING OTHER PEOPLE: IMPORTANT REQUIREMENTS
Some extended essays will require you to do research which involves other people; here
several specific requirements are essential.
You are not permitted to include participants under the age of 18 in your research.
You should avoid working with participants who are very vulnerable or experiencing
psychological distress.
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Consent forms
The informed consent of potential participants must be gained in writing prior to their
involvement in your research. You should ask participants to fill in and sign a Participant
Consent Form. You can find copies of this in the Primary Research Box on the CYP Moodle
site. These must be e-mailed to your tutor prior to submission of your essay.
It is not necessary to seek permission to use images “in the public domain” for example
publicly available Instagram feeds, images from magazines, archival materials.
Submitting confidential information
You should not upload any confidential information or the personal and/or identifiable details
of any research participant to Turnitin. This is because of data protection laws. It is possible
that external people may see your submission.
Therefore you MUST COMPLETELY ANNONYMISE ALL DATA within your essay or
submitted in your appendices, such as interview transcripts. No information that
identifies your participants should be submitted through Turnitin. Your tutor can advise on
how to anonymise your data.
Surveys
*Surveys: We do NOT recommend that you base your CYP primary research on
surveys. Any use of surveys should be agreed with your tutor. However if a survey does
form a small part of your primary research the information below applies.
For surveys where personal identifiers have not been collected and the data does not reveal,
in any way, the identity of the participants, written consent is often not gathered. Instead, the
participants should be given an information sheet before conducting the survey that explains
the purpose of the survey; provides details about any plans for sharing the data; and
includes a clause stating that an individual’s responses would not be used in any way that
would allow his/her identification.
Safety
Research should be conducted with your and your participants safety in mind. If you have
any concerns about this speak to your tutor or unit leader.
For further information on ethics, please visit:
the UAL Educational Ethics and Assessment page that includes the Code of
Practice on Educational Ethics and related resources:
https://academicsupportonline.arts.ac.uk/learning-materials/17418
Ethics for making—a space for students, teachers and makers to explore ethics in
creative arts practice, using a short documentary film “Justine” as a case study,
and
Links to further reading on Ethical issues, such as the Shades of Noir Terms of
Reference Journal Preserving Voices Vulnerable to Erasure.
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SUBMISSION OF YOUR CONTEXTUALISING YOUR PRACTICE EXTENDED ESSAY
You are required to submit your extended essay through Turnitin UK. The essay submitted
through Turnitin UK will be the definitive essay that is marked, so it must include all primary
sources and appendices (i.e. images, anonymised interview transcripts, etc).
The College / University may decide to include your work in the library, on Moodle, in an
exhibition of work, or on-line, to allow future or prospective students access to examples of
good practice and to learn from the work that you have done.
FORMATTING AND PRESENTATION: REQUIREMENTS
Title Page – Ensure your work clearly states a) your name and student ID number; b) your
degree and year of study; c) the title of the unit and the name of your tutor; d) word count.
Declaration Page – STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
You should include the following statement:
“I, your name, certify that this is an original piece of work. I have acknowledged all sources
and citations. No section of this essay has been plagiarised.”
N.B. Plagiarism forms part of Academic Misconduct.
ESSAY TITLE (Arial 22pt)
Your Full Name (Arial 16pt)
ID number
An extended essay submitted in partial
fulfilment of the requirement for
the award of the degree
BA (Hons) title of course
Tutor name
Contextualising Your Practice 2022-23
London College of Fashion
University of the Arts London
Date
Word count
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
You must acknowledge any support from within UAL, for example, Language Support; UAL
Dyslexia / Disability Service; LCF Academic Support and LCF Writer in Residence, during
your assignment.
You must also acknowledge any external (to the University) support, such as tutoring or
proof-reading, that you have received during the research and writing of your
assignment. Please note, unacknowledged support, such as proof reading, constitutes
academic misconduct (see earlier section in this guidance document).
e.g. In the writing of this essay I have received assistance from…
You can include a short statement thanking your supervisor or anyone who assisted you in
sourcing materials (i.e. an archivist, etc). This usually takes the following form:
‘I would like to thank NAME for his/her guidance throughout this essay.
You can also thank those who participated in your work, although they must remain
anonymous, so a general sentence is sufficient, such as:
I would also like to thank my participants for providing me with information on X subject, or X
Company and for taking time to answer my questions.’
ESSAY CONTENT, STRUCTURE & REFERENCING
Your extended essay is the completion and outcome of your research enquiry. It is a creative
piece of work that should be presented with care. It should structure your ideas and research
outcomes into a coherent and logical piece of critical writing. Some suggested essay
structures are below, however, you should organise your work based on what makes best
sense for you, your research process, and the nature of your discussion. Your tutor will be
able to provide guidance on this. Academic Support can also advise on structuring and
writing.
Referencing
You must fully reference your essay, making sure to acknowledge all the sources you’ve
used. This is one of the principles of academic writing. You must reference not only
academic sources but images and media sources. The standard referencing style used at
UAL is the Cite Them Right online version of Harvard. You must use this style to present
your references and bibliography. Information about it can be accessed via the e-library
through the databases A-Z, or via this link: http://www.citethemrightonline.com.
See the Library box on CYP Moodle site for further guidance.
Word Count
The word limit for the essay is 4,500 words. The word count does NOT include the title,
declaration and acknowledgement pages, bibliography, figure captions and appendices, but
DOES include all the contents of all of the sections of your essay from the first word of the
introduction to the final word of the conclusion, including quotations. Do not use footnotes.
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Although you are expected to keep within the word range specified above, there is a 10%
‘tolerance’ on word counts, so we will give leeway of plus or minus 10% (e.g. 450 words).
However, if your essay is significantly over or under the word limit this will be reflected in
your mark.
Structure
The extended essay your write for Contextualising Your Practice is similar to previous
Cultural and Historical Studies (CHS) essays in that you will be reading and using academic
literature to explore your field of practice, but it is different in that you will be carrying out
some significant primary research. Primary research allows you to make close connections
with academic literature and critical issues in your practice, therefore it is completely
acceptable to write your essay from a first-person perspective, explaining your research, why
it is important to you and what you learned from it.
Your essay must include these elements:
Title page
Declaration page and any acknowledgements
Introduction
Main Body:This should include your primary research underpinned and explained
through a critical investigation of secondary sources.
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices comprised of anonymised transcripts or images (NB: this is an optional
inclusion and will depend on if appendices are useful for your particular project.
Images may be used in the main body instead of in appendices.)
Using First Person in your Writing
We advocate the appropriate use of first person in academic writing. There are several ways
in which you might do this:
In this essay I have drawn on the conceptual framework offered by Goffman in his….
I used sensory ethnography, as outlined by Sarah Pink (2009) to explore the
atmospheric experience of London street markets. Together with my participants,
we…
Through this essay, I have attempted to…
Autoethnography – drawing on your own, first hand experience.
Never use phrases like ‘in my opinion’ or ‘I think that’.
Always back up your statements and discussion with evidence from primary research
and or academic literature.
Introduction
You should introduce your topic and inform the reader of your research question, explaining
why you feel this is a significant topic to your field of practice. You should also give an
indication of the key theoretical and conceptual ideas you have identified to analyse your
topic. You may want to include a small number of academic references to support your
claims.
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You should also state briefly how you conducted your primary research and the methodology
you employed in order to respond to your research question.
You should indicate what you have discovered from conducting your research and what you
have learned by carrying out your work in the way that you did.
You should also briefly outline the structure of your essay for your reader.
Your introduction should be concise and clear, and its purpose is to provide your reader with
a short explanation of what you have achieved.
If you are in any doubt as to what to include in this section, you should consult your tutor.
Main body
There is no one-way to structure the body of your essay. You should choose the structure
that will communicate your ideas most clearly.
The following are some suggestions of possible essay structures:
1. You could begin by setting out your secondary research in a theoretical discussion.
This would include the concepts and theories you have read about that contextualise
your topic. You should aim to discuss different viewpoints on your topic in this section
and then apply these to your primary research. Using your primary research as
evidence, you can then put forward your own viewpoint on the findings.
You can present your theoretical discussion as a separate chapter or weave it
together with the analysis of primary material, separated into thematic chapters.
2. You could create a visual narrative that uses your images or visual sources to
structure your work. You can make connections between the visual sources, using
academic theories to underpin and contextualise your ideas. This may mean tracing
your ideas through a historical narrative or looking at how certain ideas appear and
reappear across contemporary culture.
3. Autoethnography is a form of research that uses your own self-reflection and writing
to explore personal experiences. It is a way of connecting your autobiographical story
to wider cultural, political and social meanings and understandings. It is opposed to
the idea that a researcher should be detached from their subject and instead
embraces subjectivity and writing through experience. As you are researching your
own practice this can be a successful method through which to connect your own
experiences to academic theories. Please note that autoethnography does not
privilege personal experience, rather it places personal experience under close
analysis. Therefore, you must provide evidence of your first-hand accounts. Your
tutor can advise you on this.
Remember that your essay structure will be determined by your approach to research, the
primary sources that you gather, the questions you seek to answer and the depth of your
secondary research. It is important to spend time sourcing the best and most relevant
primary and secondary sources for your research. Don’t settle for what you find at a first
glance. Use your primary sources and your secondary sources as evidence to put forward
what you wish to say. Your essay will only be as strong as the research that you carry out.
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Bear in mind that knowledge is contested, and that it is historically and geographically
specific. You should use academic sources to demonstrate the knowledge that already
exists around your topic, but you should also seek to challenge it and show how it shifts and
changes over different times and places, using your primary sources as evidence.
Conclusion
Your conclusion should include a summary of your essay and address the research
questions you set out to answer.
Bibliography
Your bibliography will immediately follow the final chapter and should be presented using the
Cite them Right (CTR) version of Harvard. This is the standard referencing style used at
UAL. Information about it can be accessed via the e-library through the databases A-Z, or
via this link: http://www.citethemrightonline.com
The bibliography should be listed in alphabetical order according to author’s surname.
Appendices
If you undertake interviews or use focus groups as part of your research, you will need to
include in your appendices an anonymised transcript of your interviews and focus groups.
You do not have to transcribe full interviews. You can include abstracts (short paragraphs) of
the relevant areas you are using in your essay.
In your appendices you may want to provide: Interview schedules/questions; anonymised
transcripts of interviews; notes on object analysis; ethnographic observations; auto ethnographical notes; additional images; detailed findings that you refer to in the text but that
would detract from the work if included within the body of the text (for example: lengthy
tabular statistics gathered from a major report). These are examples only and the list is
indicative, not exhaustive.
Referencing images or charts (figures)
NB* If you wish to analyse very explicit materials, you should discuss this with your tutor and
seek their advice.
You must caption all your images thoroughly and list them in your bibliography. This
demonstrates the depth of your research.
At a minimum, you must include:
author (if available)
year produced (if available)
title of image (or a description)
Format and any details (if applicable)
Location of the source. (i.e. book Website Museum numbers ) e.g.
Available at: http://www.fashionimages.co.uk
accessed day month year (the date you viewed/ downloaded the image) e.g.
Accessed on November 2, 2022
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A figure is anything in pictorial ie an image, diagram or chart. You should number figures
consecutively within the text. The source(s) should be given beneath the figure.
It is suggested that you label your figures in the following manner:
Figure 1 Brief caption contextualising the figure in relation to your argument e.g. ‘This image
exemplifies Tommy Ton’s aesthetic signature of zooming in on an accessory or outfit detail:
here, the ornate Iris van Herpen pumps of an unidentified show-goer (Ton, 2012).
You should be careful when using photographs and images from books and online, as it is
highly likely that the author sourced them elsewhere. Check the list of photographs/
illustrations to find the original source, which is the one that you should use.
If you take your own photographs to illustrate your essay, you must describe them correctly
so that the reader knows what is being shown. Be aware that if you wish to take a
photograph of a painting, an object in an exhibition, or a retail store, you must give the
location, but you should note that the taking of photographs is often prohibited in museums,
galleries and retail stores.
Tabular information may contain numerical data or words. Tables should be numbered in
similar fashion to the way in which figures have been explained. For example, Table 1 etc,
once again the source(s) should be given immediately beneath the table.
USEFUL HINTS
Some final hints to help you think about how to write your essay:
You should have clarity in your questions and the methods in which you seek to
answer them
You should make sure that your subject matter is concise enough for a 4,500-word
essay
Think of your extended essay as a long argument. To be effective, your argument
must be clear, systematic and sustained throughout the work.
The structure of your essay is important. Take time to consider how best to build your
argument:
Write a concise introduction that explains what your essay seeks to do and what you
want to find out
Ensure that your conclusion fully addresses the significance of your work.
FIGURE 1