the modules

Issues in Globalisation

(20 credits)

This module addresses the relationship between the global economic policies of neoliberalism as exemplified by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation and the impact of these policies upon local communities in all parts of the world through measures such as structural adjustment.

The module raises issues around the core concepts of democracy, participation and human rights (especially child rights) and how these concepts can become expressed in active citizenship. It examines the effects of global media upon indigenous cultures, highlighting the contradiction between the desire for prosperity according to the Western notion and the need to preserve culture diversity for the longer term health of the species.

The module adopts a problem-solving pedagogy grounded in the realities from which the students come in order to help them to connect with the macro-movements of the modern world. Workshops, seminars and mini-lectures are the teaching methods employed for this module.

 

Integrated Workshop in Theatre and Media for Development

(40 credits)

This double module centres upon the concept of facilitation and provides a series of learning opportunities through which students gain confidence in the leading of both the micro-structure of the workshop and the macro-structure of a project aimed at sustainable social transformation.

Improvising and devising are taught through both practice and theory within the teaching sessions and through the opportunity for students to engage in small-scale fieldwork where they can test out their learning. By these means the students become advanced practitioners of theatrical processes which can be applied in both formal and informal educational contexts.

The emphasis in the approach is to the transfer of skills, capacities and attitudes from the student facilitators to the children and young people with whom the students engage in the fieldwork.

Students experience a range of participatory learning activities centred upon the idea of using theatre as a research process which operates through the medium of story, moving from the individual to the collective as stories are transformed by the techniques of the drama process such as image and forum theatre.

The Major Project

(60 credits)

This triple module requires the students to engage in an in-depth fieldwork project where they take control of the learning through the organisation and delivery of a project that is assessed according to the criterion of sustainable transformation.

Each student acts as a facilitator of the learning needs of the young people with whom they work in order that they can build the capacity of the young people to become the subjects not the objects of their own development.

Where the students are school teachers is it expected that this extended practice will be located in the schools where they are employed, thereby introducing radical pedagogies that have the potential to lead to institutional transformation and to develop levels of participation and ownership in the learning process and in the curriculum through which that process is articulated.

Others may be operating across a range of more informal contexts through liaison with NGOs which have a remit to support marginalized communities and vulnerable people.

Each project that is undertaken has a supervisor allocated to it who observes the students working in their chosen contexts and who looks for evidence of rigorous monitoring and evaluation through the journal that students are required to keep. In addition the students make a presentation at the conclusion of their projects where they reflect upon the learning accomplishments of the project for themselves and upon the achievements and limitations of the project in terms of the original aims set in consultation with the supervisor.

 

Independent Study or Consultancy

(60 credits)

The final element of the course requires students either to write a 15,000 word dissertation on a topic of their own choosing, subject to the tutorial guidance of the staff team, or undertake a consultancy at the behest of a commissioning agency for whom they write a report ( about 4,000 words) together with a critical annex submitted to the course tutors where they reflect upon their own development as specialists in the facilitation of Theatre for Development. It is normally expected that the consultancy will contain a substantial degree of action research to supply the evidence base for the subsequent report. The choice of option is made subject to the guidance of the tutorial staff who advise in relation to the career aspirations of the particular student.