English, Media, Drama and Writing

Interactive Learning Skills and Communication (ILSC) will help you to develop your academic, research, communication, and literacy skills in preparation for your undergraduate degree. ILSC covers reading, writing, speaking, and listening and will give you an understanding of institutional culture, practices, norms, and expectations of UK higher education. You will develop transferable skills such as effective communication to support ongoing study, career, and professional development skills.

Information Communication Technology (ICT) provides you with the practical computer skills needed for university. In this module, you will cover fundamental topics surrounding the use of technology and discuss these together with societal and ethical perspectives. This will allow you to reflect on and discuss the main challenges facing society and consider the implications of your technology use. This module requires no previous technical experience and will introduce you to practical ICT skills that will be needed for academic success across many areas of higher education. By the end, you should have sufficient proficiency in the Microsoft Office productivity suite for planning and producing presentations, using functions, and writing formula to display, formatting and analysing quantitative data, and producing written assignments to a standard appropriate to higher education.

This module aims to enable you to participate in and practice independent learning tasks for deeper thought and investigation as needed for Higher Academic pursuits. You will participate in a Socratic Discussion based around Conspiracy Theories and Source Checking to encourage presentation and debating skills. You will be encouraged to invest in strategies that will deepen understanding and interpretation of processes, motives, argument, rationale, credibility, and possibilities which will then be applicable to a range of studies. You will also undertake research, based on an issue related to your degree programme, to review the main points of examining an argument in depth. You will then learn to create a personal response that analyses the content of the issue under study.

Intercultural Studies explores differences between cultures and subcultures around the world. Within this module, you will draw from your own cultural experiences as well as learning from other people and lecturer-led case studies. The aim of this module is to increase your awareness and help you to further develop an understanding toward other cultures and value systems. You will gain the skills required to explore and articulate comparisons between different cultural practices, institutions, beliefs, and analytical frameworks.

Ethics is all about making decisions based on what you consider to be correct and not correct which is a discipline that is fundamental for students in higher education. Within this module, you will discuss the complexity of ethical theory and will investigate the status of several major ethical theories and claims and consider some practical ethical issues which are impacted by these theories. You will be encouraged to use critical thinking and research to discuss descriptive, normative, and analytic approaches to ethical problems and you will also look at how ethics is applied within the humanities, technology, business, medical and legal contexts.

Psychology will teach you about the brain and psychosocial contexts within the humanities and sciences. Within this module, you will look at how research has informed theories about how we think and behave, and how this applies in a variety of contexts. You will learn about the main psychological approaches (cognitive and behavioural; psychodynamic; developmental, social and biological) which will be discussed in relation to current psychological theory. You will also be given an introduction to psychopathology through the discussion of mental health disorders. By applying psychological principles to current events and common situations, you will gain a greater understanding of human actions and motivations.

Composition and Style teaches a structured introduction to all aspects and stages of the academic writing process. This module is vital for providing you with the knowledge required for the preparation and completion of written assignments within university and to university standards. This includes research and note-taking; structuring work; drafting and redrafting; editing and proof-reading; achieving an effective academic style; referencing; writing effectively under differing conditions; using feedback on your written work and grammar and punctuation. A considerable proportion of this module focuses on writing processes, and more specifically how these processes correspond to the different creative stages of writing.

In this module you will address social perceptions and commonly held beliefs or ideas held across Western cultures in response to a series of topics. Understanding and discussing these areas will help to provide you with the transferrable skills needed for university and beyond. This module will assess your ability to grasp a variety of typical responses and critically think, respond, and debate about contradictory approaches to an idea. It will integrate different thinkers (historical and current), media and communications influences, and perspectives on the topic for a given week.