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This module provides historical context to the major aspects of primary, secondary and tertiary education, as well as education in informal settings. Focusing primarily on England, the module will focus on the development of education in the 19th, 20th and 21st era. The module will integrate the study of the contextual history of education with the ‘Self as Academic Student’. As a result, you will use your study of primary and secondary materials, formative and diagnostic reflections, and assessment planning, in order to build an understanding for what it means to be a student in higher education. Key study skills such as: referencing; academic writing for different audiences, and critical reading and reflection will be addressed. 

This module is structured around two key questions; 'What is learning and how do we learn?' and 'What is the role, purpose and function of education?' Question one is addressed primarily through the examination of a range of key psychological theories of learning and cognitive development. You will also examine how these theories have impacted on educational practice. Question two will be considered via contemporary issues relating to educational experiences and how sociological perspectives can provide a critical lens to understand these issues. Throughout the module you will consider the role, purpose and function of schooling in contemporary society. You will then examine the different outcomes of education systems to develop an understanding for why and how these outcomes may vary for different groups.

This is an introduction to some of the important contemporary debates in Childhood Studies and society. The module will explore and evaluate the construction of childhood, the inequalities which surround childhood, and what it means to be a child in the UK in the 21st century.

Alternatively, you can select to study one route from the list below:

Creative Writing route: Writers Salon

Writers always learn from reading. Drawing on the tradition of the literary salon and writers’ salons in the 21st century, this module provides a framework for you to extend your writing skills through an exchange of ideas and collaborative learning. You will reflect on how your reading can inform and improve your own practice as a writer. Areas for consideration may include voice, form and structure, pace and development, genre, language, and the relationship of writer to reader. Reading for craft will be introduced through core readings in poetry and prose and will draw on materials from a range of countries and cultures, including published work from writers of colour and writing in translation. As well as producing new creative work, you will be expected to work individually or collaboratively to host the salon, selecting material, leading discussions, and devising exploratory writing activities.

Drama route: Shifting Stages

On this module you will develop and demonstrate performance skills relevant to chosen theatrical texts. Analysing the structures, both linguistic and narrative, of play texts and performances, you will explore a range of critical and technical perspectives. Through workshops, you will engage in a practical exploration of the module topic through a range of tutor-led exercises, consolidating your knowledge through creative practice and working collaboratively with others.

English Literature route: Introduction to Drama - Shakespeare

The module will introduce you to the playwright, William Shakespeare. It will explore textual production and the performance of plays in the early modern period. It will also examine Shakespeare’s meaning in contemporary culture by considering the continued adaptation of his work in other media forms such as novels or films. You will use examples of Shakespeare in adaptation to discuss key topics such as gender, social justice and (post)colonialism. In doing so, the module will explore Shakespeare’s significance to British culture, as well as his global legacy.

History Route: Global Cities

This module examines the role of cities in global history, particularly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You will gain an understanding of the significance of urbanisation in modern history, and the development of cities as key sites of global trade and exchange of ideas. Topics covered may include sanitation processes and hygiene movements, city planning, migration, the slave trade, colonialism, sport and leisure, religion and the arts. You will be introduced to cultural and social history concepts and engage with different types of history, such as urban history, medical history, environmental history, visual and material history and migration history.

This module looks at who is included and excluded within education in the UK and internationally. Using critical theory and lived experience, it encourages you to reflect on political, economic, social and cultural contexts to understand how and why inclusion and exclusion take place. Using concrete examples and contexts, you consider how educational inclusion can be created and the barriers that stand in the way.

This module aims to support you intending on going into both teaching and non-teaching-based careers. It will equip you to make informed, critical, and confident assessments of the opportunities, debates, and challenges that are presented by the graduate landscape. In this module, you will consider what it means to develop your ‘employability’, identifying personal strengths, areas for personal and professional development, and opportunities by which this development might be achieved.

This is an important module on the programme. It has been carefully designed to introduce you to the various approaches and methods that can be used to carry out research into the lives of both those giving and receiving education. You will be introduced to the process of conducting educational research in its entirety: the initial stages of thinking about research questions; designing a project; choosing particular methodologies and methods; and finally analysing your data. You will be encouraged to view this through a political and philosophical lens, as well as an educational perspective, and to consider the ethics of research. Our aim is to prepare you for the level 6 dissertation module.

Music in the Life of the Primary School

This module is based on the principles that everyone can be a musician, that children and adults can always develop and improve musical skills, and that all teachers and intending teachers can offer rich, high-quality musical experiences for pupils. Whilst there will be an emphasis on accessible, enjoyable practical musical activity throughout the module, there are no pre-requisites and there will be absolutely no expectations that you have a particular background or expertise within music. However, you will be expected to embrace a range of supportive opportunities within workshops.

Cultural and Educational Transformations

This module is concerned with examining how technology has impacted and changed education and learning. We will consider key cultural changes, for example, that we now live in the ‘digital age’; how technological change has impacted on notions of children’s and young people’s media literacy, e-learning, e-safety and social networking, which in turn may affect contemporary notions of time, space and identity.

Alternatively, you can continue with the route selected in the first year:

Creative Writing route: Story Craft

Narrative remains a tremendously powerful tool in all aspects of media, in marketing, advertising, gaming, as well as all aspects of fiction. This module will remind you why, and how, this is so. Main themes may include narrative arcs and structures, characterisation, pace, event, story-world, dialogue, clue-laying, revelation, and concealment, and means of involving the reader. The module will focus on storytelling and prose, looking at story structure, narrative structure, and drive, and how writers compel us to turn the pages. It will consider how the art of storytelling has adapted to its contemporary setting and the relationship between form and content. You will develop your understanding of the importance of showing rather than telling and of the capacity strong image has to carry emotional content.

Drama route: Theatre Revolutions

You will engage with key moments of transition in theatre practice and develop your understanding of those changes from a range of cultural and historical perspectives. Theatre is an ever-changing form and this module provides you with the opportunity to explore exciting moments of change throughout history such as the shift from melodrama to naturalism or the shift from naturalism to post-dramatic performance. Themes you will explore could include Justice, War and Love.

English Literature route: Text Technologies

Literary and historical texts have always come down to us in material forms - from stone and wax tablets inscribed with a chisel or stylus to being held as electron charges within capacitors on computer microchips. This module is concerned with how these material forms function and how they have shaped the writings we read. You will explore three topics: '‘Manuscript, writing up to the year 1500’, ‘Printing, 1440-2000’, and ‘Digital texts, the 20th century and beyond'. You will discover the revolutionary aspects of each of these developments in text technologies and how they transformed writing, its dissemination and consumption. We will consider such questions as how print disrupted and displaced manuscript culture, how the changing economics of textual dissemination affect what gets written and disseminated, and how reading is shaped by the medium in which the writing is embodied.

History route: Humans and the Natural World

This module will examine how humans have used, adapted, represented, changed and explored the natural world through the sciences and medicine, sport and leisure, industry, religion and visual culture, among others. You will be introduced to a diversity of historical approaches, including the history of science, medicine and technology, environmental history, sport history and visual history.

This module has been designed by disabled and neurodivergent students and teachers so that the issues important to them are accurately depicted and taught. It explores the big issues in Special Educational Needs (SEND): key theories, disability activism, the neurodiversity movement, current law and policy, and the barriers that disabled students continue to face in education. You will learn to identify and critically assess the academic, professional and lived experience resources that support inclusive, person-centred educational practice. 

Creativity in Education

This module equips you with an understanding of arts and creative education policy, pedagogy, curriculum design, and assessment in a time of educational, economic, technological and social change. We will explore the place of the arts and creativity in the evolving English education system and in the early years, informal, community, training therapy settings and for employability and sustainability goals. We will consider the various motivations for the inclusion of arts in education and key contemporary debates regarding intercultural and multicultural arts education, the nature of 'creativity' and the creative industries, the influence of technology, and access and equality of opportunity.

Radical Education

This module gives you the opportunity to consider possibilities for radically different educational structures, meanings and practices. We develop Critical perspectives on education and explore alternative conceptualizations through theories of Critical pedagogy and the development of Critical Consciousness. You will be encouraged to think critically and creatively, to challenge and debate, and will have the chance to produce and defend your own educational innovations.

Global and Comparative Education

This module encourages you to look beyond UK borders by examining education systems outside the UK, utilising comparative frameworks and considering global conceptualisations of education. The module will deepen your understandings of contemporary issues and key debates with reference to evidence-based education practice, the humanities, culture, and policy.

Adult Learners and Life-long Learning

This module explores the relationship between contexts, theories and methods of adult education as a lifelong activity. Focusing on real-life educational sectors, such as prison, community and museum education, the module seeks to promote theoretical and practical criticality, while highlighting alternative educational settings beyond primary and secondary schools.

The Practice and Policies of Primary Education

This module considers national perspectives on primary education and provides an insight into teaching and learning in contemporary primary classrooms. By investigating primary education, this module will not only allow you to look at pedagogical approaches, but allow you to investigate the perspectives of some key issues, theoretical perspectives and research findings into teaching and learning in this particular sector. You will be encouraged to understand what researchers are suggesting and enter the debates about political elements of current primary policy and practice.

Education and Equality: Class, Race and Ethnicity

This module is an interdisciplinary module which incorporates historical, sociological and psychological understandings concerned with issues of equality; equality of opportunity and justice in education. The module discusses current debates concerning social class and educational outcomes and explores the consequences of the social class divide in education, for individuals and society as a whole. Constructions of race and culture are very relevant to a wide range of educational issues such as achievement and attainment, exclusions and educational rights.

Collaborative Curriculum Design

This module will enable you to develop a critical understanding of how curricula are decided and designed, and to gain practical skills in developing and improving curricula. During the first half of the module, you will learn about how curricula are controlled, influenced and designed in the UK and elsewhere. You will engage with and critique traditional curriculum design and alternatives, considering questions such as decolonizing, Universal Design for Learning and creativity. In the second half of the module, you will respond to a real-world brief to improve and/or develop an aspect of the BA Education Studies programme, which may then be applied in future years, building skills in collaboration, negotiation and effective inclusive communication.

Gender and Education

This module examines the education system and its relationship to the wider society as well as social change with respect to gender relations. You’ll be encouraged to explore the literature and the themes in relationship to your own and others’ experiences and to your own practice. The module is facilitated through interactive workshops.

Reflection on Practice: Teaching and Learning

This module requires you to source and undertake a placement within a chosen learning environment, immersing yourself in the everyday life of that environment, to gain a more holistic understanding of teaching and learning, while also developing your experiential awareness. Your placement will provide you with the opportunity to reflect on practice, which will allow you to not only deepen and consolidate your existing knowledge and understanding of education, but also to explore new branches of theory, practice, policy and pedagogy to explain, support and/or challenge your observations and experiences. Through observing and working with professionals and learners, you will be encouraged to adopt the approach of a reflective practitioner to develop your knowledge and understanding for education.

Alternatively, you can continue with the route selected in the first year:

Creative Writing route: Uncreative Writing, Creative Misbehaviour

This module encourages you to rethink the very premise of ‘Creative Writing’ as self-expression. Creative Writing is founded upon notions of ‘original’ composition, and the quest to find a ‘unique’ voice. The ability to generate new writing that expresses creative thought and reflects upon experiences is one of the enduring definitions of what it means to be human. But there is an alternative history of ‘Uncreative Writing’ that challenges these ideas and welcomes kinds of writing practice open to chance procedures, ‘conceptual writing’, ‘found’ and ‘appropriated’ texts, and experiments with artificial constraints. You will learn about the innovations of Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Oulipo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Conceptual Writing. You will also explore a range of ideas, attitudes and practices that have been central to visual art, musical composition, mathematics, and Zen. Central to the module is a celebration of the importance of play and experimentation and you will rethink notions of originality, authenticity, authorship, inspiration, and self-expression.

Drama Route: Performance, Identity, and Activism

This module explores the ways in which theatre and performance has been, and can be, used as a vehicle to discuss politics, to emancipate individuals and communities, as a tool for intervention and liberation, or as a means of engagement and communication within society. Exploring politics of personal identity and social relations, the module enables you to make connections between performance and political activism, using intersectional perspectives – race, gender, sexuality, class, and (dis)ability – to create work that pushes beyond pure entertainment. It also considers ways in which drama, theatre and performance functions as a means of engagement and communication within society.

English Literature route: World Englishes: On the Page and Beyond

This module explores a diverse range of ‘World Englishes’ or English-language literature from across the globe. You will develop your knowledge on the production of English literature in a variety of national, ideological, historical, or social contexts and examine examples both on and off the written page. The module focuses on the legacy of colonisation in anglophone and/or postcolonial nations, and the literature thereof. There is an emphasis on the interactions between text and context, and you will be encouraged to explore a range of concepts such as memory, nationality, class, ethnicity, and gender.

History route: The World on Display

This module explores the complex histories of collecting and displaying. You will examine the relationship between museums and history by looking at the origins of museum objects and the histories that shaped collecting practices. You will examine these which may include public history and heritage sites, the impact of colonialism and decolonisation processes in the formation of museums, as well as the effects of the emergence of academic disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology in the shaping of collecting and displaying practices.

Your Dissertation enables you to evidence your levels of understanding of the research process and your ability to initiate, undertake and successfully conclude a research project. The dissertation is an independent study on a topic of your choice, agreed with the subject team and supported by tutorial advice. You will be given the opportunity to engage in sustained independent study, resulting in a 6,000-8,000-word extended essay which can be presented as either a Critical Review or a Fieldwork project.