AE6009 - Education and Children's Lives: Social Worlds of Childhood (2023/24)
| Module specification | Module approved to run in 2023/24 | ||||||||||||
| Module title | Education and Children's Lives: Social Worlds of Childhood | ||||||||||||
| Module level | Honours (06) | ||||||||||||
| Credit rating for module | 30 | ||||||||||||
| School | School of Social Sciences and Professions | ||||||||||||
| Total study hours | 300 | ||||||||||||
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| Assessment components |
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| Running in 2023/24(Please note that module timeslots are subject to change) |
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Module summary
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.
Prior learning requirements
Enhanced DBS for school placement.
Syllabus
The module explores and addresses:
• Histories of education, ‘modern’ childhood and ‘the child’
• Social constructionism, developmentalism and beyond nature/culture
• Spatiality, children’s lived spaces and institutional design
• Childhood and social class, ethnicity, gender, (dis)ability and sexuality
• Equality, diversity and difference
• Childhoods across majority and minority worlds and local impacts on schooling and other institutions of childhood
• Children’s work, labour and play
• Institutions of childhood and children’s lives in institutions
• Research and research methods on, with and by children
Balance of independent study and scheduled teaching activity
The module offers a blended approach to learning comprising, inter alia, opportunities for directed study, workshops, lectures and prepared seminars with research activity. The latter requires students to undertake a small-scale research activity involving children in settings as a case study that draws the components of the module together.
Students will be given a Research, Practice and Placement Booklet. which they will refer to and use throughout this module and across the two years of the course. This booklet will also be used in all placement and school visits and can be shown and used in work with their mentors in the schools.
Learning outcomes
On successul completion of this module, students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate systematic understanding of keys aspects of the contribution and usefulness of social constructionist accounts of childhood;
2. Demonstrate systematic understanding of keys aspects of practical responses to addressing social and cultural differences in childhood and the relationship between the practices and values of institutional settings and children’s lives as social actors;
3. Be able to discuss and critically evaluate children’s lives in terms of the language of space, place and spatiality and its contribution to understanding children’s lives;
4. Demonstrate the ability to conduct small-scale research with children that can inform their practice as professionals.
Assessment strategy
Students will demonstrate that they have met the learning outcomes through the submission of:
1. 1,000 word essay discussion of childhood as historical, social and spatial phenomenon as preparation for examination of children’s lives and lived spaces.
2. 3,000 word report on a small-scale qualitative research project with and/or by children in an institutional setting, including reflection on methods and methodologies.