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.
Transformations in Digital Education
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.
Understanding Learning and Wellbeing
This module explores child development and in particular an individual's social and emotional development. It will examine a range of perspectives which consider how the cognitive, social and emotional realms of individual development are all closely interlinked and mutually dependent. Drawing on psychological, and socio-political theories and literature, the module will also support students in exploring and better understanding the causes underpinning different levels of student wellbeing and how the education system is working to support children towards higher levels of wellbeing.