A little more about the course..

Education Studies is a great all round teaching course and for people like me, who know they want to go into teaching but don't know whether they want to teach young children or older children, it opens up brilliant opportunities to figure out and decide what career it is you want to go into.
Personally, I always thought I wanted to teach young children, of the reception/year one age, however, after being on Education Studies for the past seven months I have changed my mind and now want to go into year 6 or year 7 teaching as I feel this would be more suited to me.

Some people will be wondering if we get to go on placements, and then answer is YES, but not in your first year. Which I was quite disappointed about but I am excited to go into my second year this September knowing I get the chance to go into settings and get a real feel for what it is exactly that I want to do.

Education Studies in your first year is a broad range of subjects, with early years, understanding education, social constructions of childhood and inclusion through professional practice as your four subjects. However, these are not carried on throughout the three years of the course, for your second year you get to choose two of your own subjects and you have two core subjects, so as you can see this is where you begin to shape your own career in teaching and education.

I am so happy I chose to do education studies as I was still so unsure of what I wanted to do as a career, I didn't even know if teaching was the way to go but I've always loved teaching and thought "why not!".

Can't decide on a course?

For those of you wondering what the course actually entails, I am going to describe as best as I can the main points:
1. Understanding Education and Schooling is a subject that covers a wide range of education as a whole. The first assignment I did was to make a timeline about someone who went to school between a certain period of time, which was so interesting and allowed me to learn more about education in that particular period of time.
2. Social Constructions of Childhood covers mainly the history of education. This is also a very interesting subject as it teaches us about where education comes from and how it has evolved over time.

These first two subjects are the only two subjects we have exams for in our first year.

3. The Young Child in Education is a as it sounds really, it is only focused on early years education which is not exactly suited to me but allowed me to make a decision about where I wanted to focus my teaching career in.
4. Inclusion Through Professional Practice is the most difficult to get your head around at first. It looks at all different educational policies and also focuses on disability studies at points. I really enjoy this subject as a whole and the assessments are really suited to me. We had to do a poster presentation and an annotated bibliography to accompany this, and I have just handed in my critical essay for this module(which is not as suited to me as the presentation).

Good luck in whatever you decide!

So there's a quick insight into Education Studies as a whole. I know from experience, that looking at all for the education and teaching courses is a bit daunting and can confuse people(it did me!). I hope this blog post gives you a good idea into the course and helps you to make a decision about your university career!