EDU-20022 - Module Specification
School of Social Sciences
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Programme/Approved Electives for 2024/25

Available as a Free Standing Elective

Co-requisites

None

Prerequisites

None

Barred Combinations

None

Description for 2024/25

This module teaches students how to make valid and socially instructive comparisons of educational policy and practice across a range of national contexts, including Britain, the United States, countries in Asia and so on. Students will compare and contrast national and regional approaches to governance, stakeholder roles and responsibilities, competition, and the tension between striving to maintain standards and being inclusive. They will explore how and why countries borrow educational policies or practices from each other. Students will learn to describe significant differences and similarities between different countries, using a range of sources including statistics, policy documents, personal experience and themed discussion, explaining and accounting for educational differences effectively in both written and presentation formats.

1. To enable students to understand and explain the differences in educational policy and practice across the US and Britain, as well as selected other countries, in terms of governance, roles and responsibilities, and in terms of balances between the imperatives of competition, striving to maintain standards and being inclusive.
2. To introduce differences between the countries as a central framework for such comparison.
3 To enable students to develop comparative analysis skills using a range of sources including research, statistics, policy documents and personal experience/accounts and themed discussion.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Compare and contrast between various education systems, including the British, US and Asian countries' models: 1,2
Use a range of sources including statistics, research, NGO reports, policy documents, personal accounts and experiences, and discursive or themed analyses of educational policy and practice to produce such descriptions and analyses: 1,2
Evaluate key aspects of their own education system/experience through placing it in a wider context: 1,2
Illustrate how roles and responsibilities among educational stakeholders vary across the countries and regions according to history, and to political and economic priorities: 1,2
Explain how standards and inclusion are conceived differently across countries and regions, and how they interact to direct policy: 1,2
Illustrate ways that educational borrowing and convergence occurs across countries, and some of the unintended outcomes of this: 1,2
Ask theoretically productive questions of other education systems on the basis of critical reflection on their own: 1,2
Work collaboratively with people from other countries to find out how and why educational experiences differ, and relate these different experiences to broad policy and theoretical discussion: 2

Study hours

22 active learning hours: 1 lecture (1 hour) and 1 seminar (1 hour) for 10 weeks, 1 interactive lecture (2 hours) for 1 week (group project and presentation)
30 hours of group work on project and presentation
48 hours of directed study tasks, preparation for seminars, individual consultation with module lead and reading
50 hours of essay preparation and writing

School Rules

None

Description of Module Assessment