Primary Education (two-year accelerated degree)BA (Hons)

Curriculum, Learners and Learning I

This module aims to:

• Extend, consolidate and enhance the meaning of the curriculum
• Explore how children learn
• Reflect on and capture students personal learning journeys and the influence these have on their learning and teaching
• Analyse pioneers of learning theories and how they influence learners and learning in the 21st century
• Enable students to understand the early years and primary curricula, exploring the distinctiveness of each phase
• Engage students in thinking about the relevance of subject knowledge and how this impacts on effective delivery of the taught academic and pastoral curricula
• Examine assessment in the curriculum and how this is linked to progression of learning
• Understand early years and primary pedagogy

Global Challenges: Inclusion in Practice

This core module addresses a key aspect of professional knowledge in the early years field and aims to enable students to:

• Study relevant legislation, curriculum frameworks, codes of practice and official guidance in all areas of social inequalities;

• Understand the development of diverse identities in children and explore issues of stigmatisation, labelling, stereotyping and discrimination;

• Consider that children’s experience of childhood will be mediated by class, race, gender, culture, language, sexual orientation, age and disability through reflecting on their own identities and experiences;

• Develop an understanding of the concepts of inclusion and diversity as they relate to both children and adults in their sphere of work and to critically reflect on their own practice in seeking to address inequalities;

• Current childhood policy contexts will be considered, with regards to children’s rights, equity and discrimination and the role of educational settings in both perpetuating and resisting inequalities and in working with children to develop positive views of diversity;

• Consider the children as active in shaping their own childhood and how practitioners can develop a listening culture in settings and thereby act as an informed advocate for children across the age ranges and for their families.

Reflecting on educational research and practice

This module aims to:

This module will introduce and explore key academic skills to support students throughout the course. It will also introduce and make clear links to AE5017 in supporting students to reflect on and plan areas for development in relation to their own learning, research and professional practice skills. This module will also encourage students to foster their own research interests and reflect on research design. This aims to support progress across the course and link to their final year AE6P06 action research project.

Students will engage in critical exploration of a variety of academic texts. Key concepts relating to educational research will be explored. In particular, this will cover discussions around ethical research practice. Students will also be encouraged to begin thinking about situating research within differing social, political, cultural and environmental contexts.

Understanding Education Policy, Themes and Issues

The module aims:

• To offer students a broad overview of educational policies, themes and issues that will encourage reflection on their experience and inform their identities as educational professionals.

• To situate these policies, themes and issues within historical, political, social, economic and global contexts thereby opening up students’ educational imagination.

• To consider the meaning of primary education, along with debates over its values in relation to social, economic and personal goals.

• To introduce pedagogy, curricula and assessment.

• To enable students to construct and use critical languages and appropriate vocabulary to express their knowledge and understanding of education and professional practice.

• To recognise education as a site for dispute, controversy and contest and the responsibilities of teachers as social pedagogues.

• To encourage discussions about social justice in education and decolonising the curriculum.

Working with Children and Preparing for Professional Practice

This module is designed to enable students to undertake a period of work-based learning, in relation to their course at level 5, within an appropriate organisation, and to gain credit for that learning. Students will have the opportunity to apply, to test and to extend the knowledge that they have gained at all levels of their course. In so doing, students will be able to enhance and extend their understanding of professional educational practice. The module will also afford them the opportunity to gain professional experience of an appropriate education-related work environment.

Students will be expected to find and organize their own placement in an educational setting where they get insight into professional teaching and learning practice. Objectives of the placement might be in relation to professional standards, how teaching and learning is facilitated, or intended outcomes of interventions.

The module is framed by Kolb’s (1984) learning style model, the four-stage learning cycle: planning – reflecting – interpreting – identifying next steps. This cycle will inform both the module structure and the assessment strategy.
At the beginning of the module, students will attend a series of workshops where they will be briefed on the module and undergo induction. Guidance on securing a placement will be offered in conjunction with the career service, including inputs on personal and professional development.
Students will need to have their work-based learning agreement approved, before they take up the opportunity to gain practical experience.

During the work-experience, students will reflect on their observations and actions with respect of the objectives of their learning agreement and wider professional standards. There will be two or three feedback sessions allowing students to discuss their own practice and learning.

Towards the end of the work-based learning period there will be a series of workshops to support students’ interpretation of their experience in relation to theory and professional educational practice.

Students will also be offered scheduled opportunities to prepare for the QTS skills tests prior to application for PGCE places (or equivalent).

References
Kolb, D. (1984) Experiential learning experience as a source of learning and development, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Curriculum, Learners and Learning II

• To introduce subject content of the National Curriculum and Religious Education to students.

• Demonstrate practical ways in which topics and/ themes can be delivered creatively through good subject knowledge and an in-depth understanding of assessment and pedagogies.

• To engage with influences of learning between child development and the curriculum and the impact this has on effectively teaching the creative curriculum.

• To enable students to understand multiculturalism, inclusion and diversity in primary curriculum including education for social justice.

Education and Children's Lives: Social Worlds of Childhood

This module offers an opportunity for independent study and aims to enable students to:

• Examine childhood as a historically and culturally constructed phenomenon and understand the role of institutions and professional practice in reproducing those constructions;

• Explore the intersections of social variables with childhood and the position of children as social actors;

• Reflect on ways that settings can and do respond to differences;

• Introduce students to the spatial turn across the social sciences and its affordances in offering insight into children’s lives;

• Equip students with practical and workable approaches to research enquiry with children.

From Elementary Schooling to 'Good Primary Practice'

The module aims:

• To offer students opportunities to understand primary education through historical themes of continuity, change and difference.

• To demonstrate the historical nature of primary school as a commonplace phenomenon in the 21st century and thereby to suggest that it will be subject to change in the future.

• To propose a social constructionist understanding of schooling and educational institutions.

• To explore the language of pedagogical practice in relation to the goals of education and the meaning of childhood.

• To explore the struggle between formal and progressive educational discourses for control over curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Primary Education Research Project and Dissertation

This module offers an opportunity for independent study and aims to enable students to:

- Undertake a professional placement in an educational setting.

- Develop further professionally by pursuing a line of study that arises out of an aspect of interest from the course.

- Extend professional competence by developing a critical understanding of the relationship between theory and practice.

- Introduce some of the major positions/philosophies in relation to research methods.

- Develop an understanding of the major research methodologies used in the field of early years/primary education by building on modules taught on the course for example AE4021 and AE5017.

- Develop an awareness of ethics in relation to research design, execute and evaluate a small-scale research project and experience supervised independent study of an extended nature.

- Develop some of the skills required for post-graduate study.

Teachers, Learners, and Schools in the 21st Century

The emergent 21st century has brought with it significant challenges for education and for educators. This module explores and investigates these challenges along with some informed speculation on likely directions for educational development. It examines the impact of globalisation, economic restructuring and encounters with cultural difference. The relationship of these phenomena to educational reform is examined along with its implications for the future of schooling. The module encourages students to consider possible educational responses to these challenges at policy, curricular and institutional scales as well as at a personal level, thereby preparing them for a role as active professional agents.

The module aims to:

• Situate education, schooling and teaching within a broad, but accessibly interpreted social, political and economic context.

• Offer students knowledge of a number of pressing challenges at global and local scales and to open up consideration of educational responses to them, along with possible linkages between them.

• Develop skills supporting formal discussion, informed debate and the judicious use of evidence to form and substantiate arguments.

• Encourage students to consider their standpoint in relation to the themes and issues examined, as well as the meaning of being a teacher in light of these challenges.