Education (Applied) MA

Course overview

The MA Education (Applied) supports you to engage in academic and professional development if you work or intend to work in the education sector.

You enhance your knowledge and understanding of education and develop academic, professional, employability and work-related skills and knowledge appropriate to the sector of education that you are interested in. You gain transferable skills which will help your practical and professional development by consolidating, enhancing and extending your disciplinary expertise, experience and abilities. The Applied route enables you to work directly with an organisation, applying and demonstrating the knowledge and skills you gain during the first stage of your course.

The course focuses on:

• enabling you to focus on a self-selected aspect of education that will be of value to your professional development
• developing your capacity to operate as a reflective professional in educational settings
• increasing your understanding of the requirements for professional attitudes and ethics in the workplace and/or a research-based environment
• supporting you to develop a range of advanced research skills appropriate to postgraduate study and professional practice that will enable you to critically evaluate existing work and design research to further knowledge within education
• enabling you to gain real-world practical experience in a professional setting to enhance your employability and underpin your academic learning.

The course comprises four 30-credit modules with a 60-credit dissertation and a 60-credit Applied Practice module. There are 12 weeks of learning and teaching or placement activity in each of the four semesters you study in over the length of the course.

How you are assessed

The assessment tasks, including formative assessment tasks, are varied and targeted at the appropriate postgraduate level capabilities. They reflect the challenges particular to each of the modules and provide you with a range of assessment experiences to explore your attainments more fully. Formative assessment is an important part of the course and your development and each module has both formal and informal formative activities and practices.

Career opportunities

All the modules on the course are designed to allow you to relate your assessed work to your own context and/or areas of work that you are engaged with or hope to move into in the future. You will graduate with in-depth and advanced knowledge and understanding of your chosen area of education, informed by current practice, scholarship and research. All of these skills will directly benefit your future career. You will be equipped to contribute to the learning of your own students and educational policy and practice. Our Careers and Employability team can help you with career planning, job seeking and applications.

Standard Postgraduate criteria will apply, plus in exceptional cases applicants who can demonstrate suitable significant experience and/or further study in the education discipline may be considered for the course and may be asked to attend an informal interview to assess their suitability. This will include intellectual and academic suitability for the course. A written record of the informal interview will be kept.