This module aims to challenge and enhance participants&#039; knowledge and understanding of international debates and research central to education involving...

Global Debates and Research into Practice: Educating Children Aged 4-12 (LCLL0035)

This module aims to challenge and enhance participants' knowledge and understanding of international debates and research central to education involving children aged 4-12. The module features input from key researchers innovating developments in practice and theory, and reviews current research that is crucial to understanding and working in the sector. The curriculum and its management, as well as the impact of context on children's progress, will be considered.

Participants will develop an understanding of the factors that influence current debates and trends in education with young children and will be encouraged to reflect upon the implications for their further professional practice. Sessions will examine research from different countries and contexts into new thinking and initiatives related, for example, to: professional identity, inclusion, equity and achievement, assessment and standards, children's mental health and wellbeing and cross-cultural perspectives on pedagogy. Implications for teaching and learning in the primary sector will be considered.

The module is highly participatory, with structured activities and developmental tasks designed to accompany input from lecturers. Participants will be encouraged to develop their own interests in particular aspects of enquiry into educating children aged 4-12, to reflect upon and share their experiences of practice and to develop an awareness of recent research and developments within schools and communities.

Mechanisms of Power: Running the Roman Empire (c. 70BC - AD275) (Dissertation) (HIST0312)

What held Rome’s provincial empire together through political revolution, civil wars, and crises of succession? This module focuses on the administration and management of this international empire of the pre-industrial age. Past interpretations of the functioning of the Roman imperial state favoured constitutional analysis or viewed it as a thin façade to mask subjection by military force; more recent scholarship has tended to seek explanation for the relative longevity and stability of Rome’s imperial dominion in the late republic and principate in less tangible phenomena: e.g. ‘honour’ (Ted Lendon) and the establishment of ‘legitimacy’, reinforced by ‘charisma’ (Clifford Ando). These and other interpretations are tested against an in-depth analysis of the workings of the organs of the city of Rome as they were adapted to imperial responsibilities, both in terms of the formal administrative structures and their functioning in practice.
While the Roman imperial system has been likened to the Thatcherite ideal of ‘government without bureaucracy’, it was certainly not a government without paperwork. The core of this module comprises the study of selections from the considerable volume of surviving documents produced in the dialogue between the central government, its provincial representatives, citizens, and subjects. Deliberately eschewing the position of Augustus and his successors as the sole reference point for the system by which Rome governed her empire, the starting point for the investigation is placed in the post-Sullan period. The end is drawn with the provincialisation of Italy, which heralded the beginning of the establishment of a new order in which urbs Roma was now part of rather than mistress over her empire. All source material will be read in translation but in parallel with the original language so that, although Latin or Greek for Beginners is not a prerequisite for this module, those with these skills will be encouraged to exercise them.

 