The start of module two

As there were so few of us at the campus day yesterday, I thought I would write up a brief outline of what was discussed for those of you who couldn't make it.

We started the afternoon being shown the final presentations of the recently graduated students. Rosemary explained that although we are only beginning module 2, seeing what we are aiming towards gives us a sense of purpose and for me, motivation. The various examples of graduates' work was presented in different ways including picture books, spiral bound booklets and posters.

Rosemary then explained that this module is basically the planning process toward the third module in which we create our presentation. She stressed that this module is a significant step up from the first module in terms of work load and time that should be committed to it.

Our third module presentation will be the produce of what we choose as our line of inquiry in this module. We spent some time going round the group individually to discuss what ideas we all had. This may have already been discussed or touched on briefly during the 'inquiry' task in module 1.

Your chosen topic needs to be something that will help you in terms of your career choice due to the fact that what you learn throughout the rest of the BAPP course is what you are likely to become an expert in, which can ultimately benefit you professionally.
For example, I shared with the group that I plan to do my topic on the importance of arts in education. This is helpful to me as I work in a school, I want to be a performing arts teacher and my training has been in performing arts.
The topic you choose needs to be something you are really interested in as you will be learning and researching about it for the rest of the year!

Throughout the rest of the day, we talked about what tools will be needed in order to start researching our chosen topic. We agreed that we will need to interview people associated with our chosen topic, access literature (via MDX library resources/ internet), find out statistics, look at different angles to get a full picture and generally become experts in our field.

Rosemary talked about the fact that ethics are very important throughout this process. Paula will be talking to us about ethics during the next campus session.

In the module handbook, one of the tasks mentions finding your 'special interest group' (SIG). We began discussing who in the group has chosen a similar topic to you. This will be something each of us look out for, in order to share ideas and comments through our blogs. (If anyone is planning to do their inquiry on education or performing arts in education, let's be SIGs!)

So now our mission is to start thinking about what we want to do our inquiry on and start working through the tasks (4a-4d)!

Hope this has made sense and looking forward to seeing you all on the 28th Feb
See you on the blogs :-)