RESEARCH AND RESEARCH DISSEMINATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA'S MASTER'S DEGREE IN DRAWING: THE MASTER'S DISSERTATION

The aim of this study is to expand upon a previous project on the University of Granada's Master's Degree in Drawing. Many changes have been made to postgraduate courses over the last few years and teaching approaches need to be constantly reviewed as a result. Our previous project examined the planning needs for Spain's new official master's courses. It responded to the specific demands of students on the Master's Degree in Drawing by providing a new website, running in parallel to the official University website, detailing all the information that a syllabus should provide to students. This new study focuses entirely on the master's dissertation because of the important role it plays in terms of both teaching and research. Our previous project highlighted the importance of specific guidelines and provided users, via the new website, with a series of instructions we drew up together. These set out requirements in terms of the structure, level of research, methodology and design of master's dissertations in order to standardise students' approach to these projects. The dissertation for the Master's Degree in Drawing is worth 18 credits out of a total of 60. However, it also requires students to expand upon work carried out previously and to develop their own research topic, laying the foundations for a possible doctoral thesis in the future. A tutor is assigned to each student to guide them through the dissertation-writing process. In order to pass this component of the course, students must present their dissertation to a board appointed by the Master's Committee. The dissertation is a highly personal piece of work created by one student with the support of a tutor. However, when it is presented it is in front of a very small group of people, and most dissertations end up gathering dust on shelves. This project aims to facilitate the dissertation-writing process for both tutors and students and has the following specific objectives: to categorise the different types of dissertations written by students on the Master's Degree in Drawing to date; to list the topics studied to date and propose new topics; and to provide access to dissertations for students and researchers via the Institutional Repository of the University of Granada. One of the key contributions that this project makes is the methodology used to analyse the dissertations. This method will allow us to add new dissertations each academic year, thus updating the data obtained in this first study. Each year, the conclusions drawn will be more reliable and we will therefore be more certain of what we are doing and where we want our research to take us