01The handbook
Issued whole at the point a module opens, so nothing in it arrives as a surprise in week three.
12contact hours a module
The module handbook, issued whole
A module handbook is issued at the point the module opens, and it states the set texts for all four of its weeks at once. Nothing is withheld until the week it belongs to.
The handbook carries, for each of the four weeks, the set text and the two supporting items, the question the seminar will be run against, and the essay question the module is assessed on where an essay is drawn from it. A candidate whose working pattern favours reading ahead can therefore read the whole module in the first week, and a candidate who reads week by week loses nothing by doing so.
Each module is closed before the next opens. A candidate is never carrying two module reading lists at once, which is the single arrangement that makes a twelve-week programme with a project attached to it possible to carry at all.
Contact is twelve hours in each module and thirty-six across the cohort. The rest of the notional hours are independent, which is what the planner on the front sheet resolves.
02Reading
One set text and two supporting items in an ordinary week; the set text read in full.
What a week of reading asks, and what the seminar assumes
Reading is issued a week ahead of the session it belongs to. The expectation is that the set text has been read in full and at least one supporting item with it, and the seminar is built on that expectation rather than on a summary delivered at the start of the session.
A week without a submission
One set text and two supporting items. This is the heavier of the two reading patterns, and it falls in the weeks the cohort grid marks as carrying nothing due.
A week carrying a submission
One set text and one supporting item, because the piece of written work due that week takes the greater part of the load.
A seminar opens at the point of disagreement. Where two commentaries treat different things as evidence, the session is spent on why, and the outcome is not required to be a resolution: a module can close having established plainly what it has not settled, and the synthesis session of the seventh week does exactly that.
This is why reading is treated as a condition of attendance rather than as an optional extension. A candidate who arrives without the set text cannot take part in the argument the session is, and the session does not slow to accommodate that.
03The three
Method, then analysis, then evidence and the standards that govern it.
3modules in sequence
The three modules, and the order they stand in
The sequence is not interchangeable. Method comes first because the second module argues with it, and evidence comes last because a candidate is by then gathering material for the independent project and the standards session has something concrete to bite on.
Module one Orientation, method and sources weeks 1–4
The cohort meets as one group and the twelve-week map is issued. Two method sessions follow: the first works a method through a single example, and the second tests that method against a case which resists it. The module closes on sources and their handling, with primary material read against its editorial apparatus.
The position note of the first week and the reading log of the third are written inside this module, and the working question of the independent project is agreed in its closing week.
Module two Analysis, synthesis and the proposal weeks 5–8
Analysis opens the module and is worked from the essay question the cohort has just answered. A second analysis session sets two readings of the same material against each other, and a synthesis session then draws the module together and states what it leaves open.
The module closes with a design clinic in which each candidate presents the project proposal in eight minutes and takes questions from the cohort. The feedback tutorial on the first essay falls inside this module, held individually and after the written comment is already in the candidate’s hands.
Module three Ethics, evidence and argument at length weeks 9–12
Research ethics opens the module, read against published governance guidance and one worked application so that the session can be spent on the difficult cases rather than on the straightforward ones. Evidence handling follows, taken against material the cohort has begun to gather for the project.
A session on the construction of an argument at length is worked on the drafts the cohort brings to it, and the twelve weeks close with a return to the framing texts of the first week, read against the position note the candidate wrote then.
04Attendance
A missed session produces a written account of what the group covered, issued before the next week opens.
Attendance, and what a missed session produces
Attendance at taught sessions is recorded against the cohort record. The record exists so that the company knows who needs what, not so that a total can be reported at the end.
Where a candidate misses a session, two things are issued before the following week opens: the session materials, and a written account of what the group covered. The written account matters more than the materials, because a seminar is an argument and the materials alone do not carry it. Where the missed session was the one a candidate’s own essay question stands on, the supervisor takes it up in the next scheduled meeting.
Reading is never reissued in a shortened form. A candidate returning from an absence reads what the rest of the cohort read, since the following session is built on the same assumption for everybody in the room.
The twelve weeks cell by cell are on the cohort grid