In your first year you'll study with our partner, ARU College. This module will provide you with the necessary skills to begin studying at level 4 in courses related to the humanities, social sciences, English, media and education. You will be introduced to the core skills necessary to succeed in higher education, including thinking critically, researching, and referencing appropriately, demonstrating appropriate numeracy and ICT skills, and communicating effectively verbally and in writing. In addition to these fundamental study skills, you'll be given an introduction to a broad range of disciplines whose skills and theories are widely applicable. You will study a variety of writing styles in order to recognise, deconstruct and replicate various forms of persuasive, analytical, and informative writing. You'll learn the basics of intercultural studies and how these theories can be applied to real-world problems. You will consider social perceptions held across Western cultures, and the difference between social and self-perception, participating in structured discussion and argument. You'll be introduced to the core principles of psychology and will explore various current applications of psychological theory. You will also be introduced to ethics and learn about some of the key theories and thinkers in the development of current ethical considerations in a range of scenarios. This module is made up of the following eight constituent elements: Interactive Learning Skills and Communication (ILSC); Information Communication Technology (ICT); Critical Thinking; Intercultural Studies; Psychology; Composition and Style; Ethics; Social Perceptions.
Establish foundational skills and understanding that you will need throughout your degree. It will equip you with the tools to explore core themes of acting, not just during your learning journey at ARU, but also in your professional career beyond. The module is a practical investigation of the dynamic tensions between individual freedom and collective discipline, self and character, spontaneity and planning, practice and reflection. In order to succeed in this competitive industry, you will need dedication and self-discipline. We will focus on learning by doing, alternating with periods of reflection, alongside self-directed study, which will include selected reading about acting, individual research, rehearsing practical tasks for classes and maintaining a log of activities and progress. The module introduces you to the tools you need to prepare a role, for both training projects and professional life. The module will promote an open-minded and experimental approach to learning activities. You will be encouraged to be brave and take artistic risks within a supportive environment in which genuine experimentation feels safe.
Researching, understanding and articulating the contemporary world of performance, its iconic practitioners, performances and cultural debates, is an essential part of your development as a professional artist in relation to your specialist discipline. In this module, you will begin to place your performance practice in its cultural context. You will research and explore important productions, genres, performance theories and practitioners related to your specialist discipline and evaluate their impact on culture and society. You will also look at influential practice from related performance disciplines, in order to understand how your practice relates to wider performance culture and history. A shared lecture programme that considers production case studies from Acting, Drama and Musical Theatre will support your studio practice, by developing your knowledge of the contexts in which a range of performance disciplines can be understood. During the module, you will choose a production case study from within your specialist discipline and conduct research to discover its director's intentions, performance detail, dramatic effect, and cultural impact. You will learn how to locate a production within wider contemporary cultural debates, and how to organise your research evidence effectively as a preparation for academic writing, in line with ARU academic protocols. Finally, you will use your research evidence to produce a short, written Production Analysis, or equivalent critical output negotiated with your tutor.
On this module you will survey the history of literature in English between the Old English period and the end of the eighteenth century, using volumes A-C of The Norton Anthology of English Literature as your key text. The juxtaposition of pieces by well-known authors (who may include, for example, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton) with less familiar texts is intended to encourage reflection upon what constitutes the ‘canon’ and the discipline of literary study more broadly. At the same time, you will be introduced to an exciting range of social, cultural and political theories that can be used to further the analysis of literary texts. These include psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory. You will put these theories into practice by applying them to the set literary texts during seminars. You will also exercise your theoretical knowledge beyond the classroom, by applying theory to your critical review of a historical artefact in a local museum.
View the full module definitionIn this module, you will engage in a full development and rehearsal process to create a studio-based, collaborative, live performance. You will work with a source text, a play script or Libretto and a musical score, engaging with the dramatic practices that are relevant to the selected work. You will contribute to the numerous staging ideas that the production will need, and work positively towards creative solutions with your peers and director. So that you can perform more effectively, you will research the world of the text, including its genre and performance conventions. You will be cast in one or more performance roles in the chosen text, which may be assigned by audition. You can also take on production tasks that are essential to live performance, with the support of professional technical staff. These roles include lighting and sound design, sourcing props, costumes and set, choreography or video projection. You may select to work as a stage manager coordinating the whole performance, alongside a role on stage. Musical Theatre rehearsals will encompass ensemble singing and one-to-one vocal coaching, as well as acting and directed script work. You should demonstrate reliability as a member of a company by full attendance, punctual arrival at rehearsals and high levels of concentration within sessions. You will develop discipline and learn rehearsal etiquette and self-awareness to cultivate an environment of trust and professionalism.
In this module you will survey the history of English Literature between William Blake and the present day. Mainly using Volume 2 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature you will study period, genre and form through a range of texts including: the novel; the short story; the essay and manifesto; poetry; drama; letters and graphic art.
View the full module definitionIn this module, you will be introduced to various strategies of adaptation and to the afterlives of a range of nineteenth-century literary texts. We will look at sequels and prequels to nineteenth-century novels and will also analyse the move from page to screen, web series, and other forms. The module is likely to cover the afterlives and adaptations of the work of writers including Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Charles Dickens. Throughout, you will develop a comprehensive knowledge of the texts studied in relation to their original context, as well as the context in which they have been adapted.
View the full module definitionThis module offers you the opportunity to perform in, design and produce a large-scale public performance, created from a selected source text. While production work will be led by a tutor, students also must agree effective methods of decision-making, show full commitment to rehearsals and production meetings and demonstrate a willingness to participate in all aspects of work on the production. This module is designed to develop your skills in performance and production work to a high level; there will be a variety of roles on-stage and back-stage for your group to manage and deliver effectively. Collaborative production modules require professional conduct from all students; measurements of such conduct will include reliable attendance, punctual arrival at rehearsals, high levels of concentration within sessions and a willingness to take direction from others. You will liaise closely with professional staff at the theatre venue during intensive technical rehearsals and your own developing professionalism will be tested during this time. For assessment, 70% of the mark will be based on the quality of the live performance and 30% on a consideration of attendance, professional discipline and your creative contribution throughout the production process.
View the full module definitionThis project-based module will give you direct experience of working as a performer and facilitator within the local community. This will increase your awareness of employability contexts, develop your ability to work with and for vulnerable groups, and hone a wide range of transferable skills. Working as an applied theatre company, you will be set a brief to design and deliver a performance project for an outside organisation, such as a local charity, museum, sheltered housing unit, school or health care provider. Practical workshops and seminar style teaching will introduce you to the given context, the ethical and practical challenges related to it, and a range of performance styles and methodologies appropriate to successfully meeting the project brief. You will then engage in a collaborative process to devise and deliver a performance off-site. This module will offer you direct engagement with the local arts community, such as children’s theatre companies at the Junction, primary or secondary schools, or local charities. The preparation of your project will develop your awareness of the ethical, practical and creative issues that must be considered when making performance for specific target audiences and in off-site locations. You will explore the diverse career opportunities within this field, while gaining real-world experience in community theatre.
View the full module definitionRuskin Modules are designed to prepare our students for a complex, challenging and changing future. These interdisciplinary modules provide the opportunity to further broaden your perspectives, develop your intellectual flexibility and creativity. You will work with others from different disciplines to enable you to reflect critically on the limitations of a single discipline to solve wider societal concerns. You will be supported to create meaningful connections across disciplines to apply new knowledge to tackle complex problems and key challenges. Ruskin Modules are designed to grow your confidence, seek and maximise opportunities to realise your potential to give you a distinctive edge and enhance your success in the workplace.
This module is an introduction to the theory and practice of dramatherapy, as practised by registered professionals in the UK. It will not train you to be a therapist, but will equip you with knowledge of the field and some introductory skills that will be useful if you are considering dramatherapy as a vocation. You'll be introduced to the clinical field and will learn about the principles of dramatherapy and other related professions, such as work in applied theatre, teaching and nursing. You'll be taught through experiential workshops linked to theoretical seminars, and also a possible field trip. Audio-visual presentations will enable you to view clinical work in process. Through these activities you'll be able to evaluate, develop and analyse your potential in this discipline and explore the application of arts media to therapeutic situations. Your assessment will comprise small group practical work in which you will actively demonstrate an understanding of the use of drama as a therapeutic tool. You'll be individually marked during this task, according to the specified learning outcomes. The knowledge you gain on this module can be applied to other modules. It may involve improvisation, role-play or performance, and can contribute to a basic understanding of groups and how they function.
View the full module definitionOn this module you'll focus on physical theatre techniques as developed by key practitioners and companies. Figures and topics might include Jacques Lecoq at the International Theatre School in Paris; experiments in dance theatre by Pina Bausch; the plays and performances of Complicité or Steven Berkoff; and the techniques taught by Frantic Assembly. In weekly workshop sessions you'll engage practically with physical methodologies for creating original performative work. These methods may include improvisation exercises, development of mime and gestural languages, experiments with neutral and expressive masks, ‘non-human’ movements, multi-role playing, clowning, chair duets, ‘pedestrian’ dance and the analysis of play-texts for their potential transformation into physical theatre performances. The movement of the body through space, and what this might be made to mean, will be a central concern on this module. This is a deceptively simple proposition, but the development of physical precision, rhythm and disciplined ensemble performance is a labour-intensive task. You'll be expected to be self-critical and able to develop your own physical work towards increasing clarity and complexity. Weekly sessions are collaborative in nature and you must be prepared to play a full part in the exercises undertaken. It is essential to wear suitable clothing to these sessions to enable you to ‘play’, according to Lecoq’s meaning of that term, which includes maintaining discipline in your work. You will be asked to work independently in small groups to devise a physical theatre performance for your assessment. You'll be asked to explain the rationale for your piece in advance of performing it, as based on ideas drawn from key contemporary physical theatre practitioners.
View the full module definitionIn this module you will study the development of science fiction as a genre, concentrating on major texts from the postwar period. You are expected to acquire an understanding of the history of science fiction and an awareness of debates around its origins, as well as a critical understanding of the problems of defining it in relation to other forms of literature. The emphasis is on science fiction as a literature of ideas, and you will have the opportunity to explore and compare examples of several key science fiction tropes. These would typically include alien invasion, posthuman identity, utopias and dystopias, alternate history, time travel and post-apocalyptic science fiction. You would also be invited to consider changes in the representation of issues such as race, class and gender in science fiction. The main focus will be on science fiction as a literary form; however there will be opportunities to consider science fiction in other media – film, comics, TV and computer games – as well as engage with aspects of the history of science fiction publishing, such as book cover design and marketing.
View the full module definitionThis module will introduce you to the field of contemporary performance theory and practice in relation to Shakespeare. You'll study a range of 20th and 21st century critical and directorial interpretations of plays by Shakespeare in the theatre and on film, exploring issues like power, sexuality, gender, justice, morality, religion and war. You’ll look at how critics, directors and actors generate meanings from Shakespeare's plays, drawing on details from primary texts, secondary criticism and examples of contemporary creative responses to the plays. For your assessment, you'll select a sequence from one of Shakespeare's plays to stage as an ensemble performance, supported by practical workshops. This performance may include interdisciplinary work involving music, song and a variety of performing styles. You'll also attend seminars that will guide the development of your project proposal, and group tutorials to help you set up your group project. In preparation for the ensemble performance, you'll submit a 1,500-word analysis of how your chosen play has been interpreted in contemporary criticism, and examine a range of creative responses to it in the theatre and on film.
View the full module definitionThis module will introduce you to a research methodology that treats the live, spatial and embodied nature of performance as a means of generating knowledge and understanding. You'll explore how performance can be designed to test or demonstrate ideas that are not amenable to library research alone, but are practice-led. 'Practice as Research' is a methodology that expands the concept of ‘knowledge derived through doing’ into a research strategy; as such, this module is particularly valuable if you are planning any kind of practical work for your Major Project. Discussion of PAR and more traditional research strategies for the Major Project will be an important aspect of this module. Practice as research will also be useful for all additional performance-based explorations of ideas that you'll encounter at levels 5 and 6. The purpose of this module is to give you strategies that will underpin the research credentials of your future practical work. It will cover both practice-led research and research-led practice. You'll explore how an understanding of ideas can be derived from existing live performance work and how such work can also generate new knowledge. These examples may encompass live art, activist performance, installations and exhibitions, workshops and performance laboratories in acting training. You'll be assessed through your own design of a practical project informed by practice as research principles, which will be performed live, with an introductory (or concluding) rationale for its design, alongside an outline of the ideas with which the performance engages.
View the full module definitionThis module provides an opportunity for you to explore the processes involved in staging short plays and scenes that combine together into a substantial production. This work may include new writing, complete short plays or play extracts. All pieces will demand intensive work in understanding their variety of forms and often experimental nature; the technical aspects of such works can also be exacting. There is therefore an array of roles to be filled on this module, including performers, directors, technicians and stage managers, with each team working to facilitate efficient turn arounds between separate scenes. In new writing, the module may include collaborative work with emergent writers from the Writing and Performance discipline group or industry professionals, such as Menagerie Theatre Company and the Cambridge Junction. At the start of the module, you will study how new plays are commissioned and developed, the relationships between writer, designer, director, cast and audience, and how the written text develops towards staging and publication. Indicative content for this section of the module may include study of or visits to the Royal Court Theatre, the Bush Theatre and Cambridge Junction to see new works staged for the first time or existing works re-staged for a contemporary audience. In the second half of the module, you will form a company to stage a selection of new writing scenes or existing shorts plays. Where this includes scripts supplied by ARU Writing students, there will be opportunities to workshop scripts with the playwrights, with one member of the group acting as director. This module allows you to work intensively and independently in small groups in rehearsal before coming together to produce one show featuring all of the work. Small-group rehearsals will be self-managed, requiring professional discipline and full participation to drive work forward. Management of the whole show will be a substantial responsibility if you choose to take a production role.
View the full module definitionOn this module you'll study an exciting period of literary history, the Renaissance, from the different perspectives of cross-cultural encounters and their impact on English imaginative writing of the period. This research-based module gives you the opportunity to explore, in-depth, the early modern literary fascination with travel and other cultures, debates around colonialism, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial ‘other worlds’, theories of creation and knowledge of nature, and relations between humans and animals. You'll explore these issues in weekly seminars, investigating the relationship between the set texts and their literary, cultural and historical contexts, including politics, race, religion, scientific knowledge, gender and the environment. Upon successful completion of the module, you'll have a greater understanding of poetic, prose and dramatic texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well the cultural, historical and literary contexts in which they were written and performed.
View the full module definitionKnowledge of a foreign language can be a major asset both in your academic and professional life. The Anglia Language Programme offers you the opportunity to study a foreign language as part of your course.
This module aims to consolidate your skills as theatre makers through the curation, programming, marketing and delivery of a festival of performance. You will synthesise and apply the processes of production explored throughout your degree, collaborating with your peers and staff and taking a high level of responsibility and independence in preparing the work created and shown. At the start of the module, you will reflect on your individual learning journey and career aspirations through the creation of professional portfolio materials to support your input to the festival. This will involve advancing your skills in creating professional CVs, show reels, online profiles and critical reflection of their suitability for your chosen career pathway. You will then identify an appropriate role for yourself as part of the festival team and will take responsibility for associated tasks, including the curation or polishing of existing work and working as an ensemble member in the creation new work for presentation at the festival. This will involve a production process, supervised by a member of staff. In the second period of the module, you will develop, rehearse, design, market and realise a piece of performance, which might be based on a published play text or musical theatre book, an adaptation from other source materials or an original devised piece. These works will form the core of the festival and inform the curation of other events, such as workshops, community performance and/or work presented by other students. The festival will be public facing and designed for an external audience. At this stage, you must show self-discipline, professionalism and full commitment to additional rehearsal and production sessions as the festival approaches.
View the full module definitionThe Undergraduate Major Project represents the culmination of study in the music and performing arts courses and allows students to engage in a substantial piece of individual research and/or creative work, focused on a topic relevant to their specific course. The project topic will be assessed for suitability to ensure sufficient academic challenge and satisfactory supervision by an academic member of staff. The chosen topic will require the student to identify/formulate problems and issues, conduct literature reviews, evaluate information, investigate and adopt suitable development methodologies, determine solutions, develop hardware, software and/or media artefacts as appropriate, develop a performance, process data, critically appraise and present their finding using a variety of media. Regular meetings with the project supervisor should take place, so that the project is closely monitored and steered in the right direction. You will be expected to display, in both your preparatory and your finished work, an advanced understanding of the methods, techniques, materials and processes available to your chosen media.
View the full module definitionThe individual Dissertation/Major Project module allows you to engage in a substantial piece of individual research and/or product development work, focused on a topic relevant to your specific discipline. The dissertation topic will be assessed for suitability to ensure sufficient academic challenge and satisfactory supervision by an academic member of staff. Your chosen topic will allow you to develop your identity as a researcher, critical-thinker, creative agent, and enhance your confidence and adaptability.
View the full module definitionYou will consider a range of plays from the period 1580 to 1642 in the light of issues of stage spectacle and representation in a variety of forms, including identity, sexuality, violence, and death. You will experience one of the greatest periods of dramatic writing that English literature has known, which has subsequently continued on the English stage under the UK’s great acting companies, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre. Primary texts will be taken from Shakespeare and his chief contemporaries, including a changing range of authors chosen from Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, John Webster, John Ford, Richard Brome, and James Shirley. You should check the reading list each year to determine specific plays. You will become familiar with relevant theory and criticism of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In seminars you will be attentive to issues of performance, which can include active learning through play-reading and walking through a scene, or in independent learning through attending relevant performances or viewing film adaptations.
View the full module definitionThis module will introduce you to the work of Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontë sisters and to literary and cinematic adaptations of their fiction. You will begin by reading Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë alongside Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth and by assessing the way in which the ‘Brontë myth’ has been sustained by different generations of readers. We will also look in detail at the diverse literary outputs of Gaskell and the Brontës. Through this, there will be a focus on the ways in which the four writers engage with their cultural contexts. In addition to thinking about the issues involved in debates about religion, education, social change, gender and familial and romantic relationships, you will be asked to consider the novels through the lens of disability theory and to assess their treatment of Imperialism and Empire. The final part of the module will involve an introduction to theories of adaptation and to rewritings and cinematic adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.
View the full module definitionOn this module you'll have the opportunity to specialise in an exciting period of literary history – the English Renaissance – and to pursue a thematic interest: the early modern literary fascination with magic. ‘Renaissance Magic’ explores the intersections between imaginative literature, science, religion and the occult, through the close study of various literary forms (from journal entries and essays, to epic poetry and drama) both canonical (including the works of Shakespeare, Jonson and Spenser) and more marginal (including seventeenth-century women’s writing, and anonymous alchemical poetry.) You'll be introduced to various aspects of magic/occult culture of the early modern period: attitudes toward angelology and demonology; the learned figure of the ‘Renaissance magus’; alchemy; the fascination with and persecution of witches; and early science fiction. The variety of different texts is designed to challenge perceptions of the ‘canon’, and to broaden views of what constituted ‘literature’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
View the full module definitionOn this module you'll focus on significant developments in contemporary theatre through detailed analysis and exploration of site-specific and immersive practices. You'll be asked to consider place and space as theoretical concepts and explore the influence of performance space on audience reception and on your own creative practices. You'll engage with a range of theoretical perspectives from theatre historians, performance scholars, philosophers and cultural geographers, and with a range of performance practices such as site-specific, promenade, immersive, digital and applied theatre. You'll take part in seminar discussions and reading group sessions, and a number of practice based workshops, off-site visits and theatre trips. These activities will allow you to develop a sophisticated understanding of the contemporary theatre context that you'll be entering after graduation, and working towards the assessment will allow you to imagine your own creative input to that context. You'll be asked to develop and thoroughly research your own idea for a new site-specific or immersive theatre performance. This will be assessed through an oral presentation in which you'll ‘pitch’ your creative idea, demonstrating its originality, thoughtful relationship to place, creative use of space and practical viability. This will allow you to be ambitious and work on a larger budget/scale production than you would usually be able to at this stage in your career. It will also develop a range of highly important transferable skills, such as presenting, budgeting, researching, exploring creative partnerships and fitting your work into the contemporary scene.
View the full module definitionThis module will develop your skills producing short dramatic works adapted for video. The videos produced may form part of your showreel after completing your degree. You will explore the preparation of video material for a variety of new media and accordingly develop basic video production skills. Regular video playback will allow for critical reflection on the work produced and highlight where improvements may be made in performances or choice of shots.
View the full module definitionYou should take this Employability module if you have had employment, want employment, need a CV, or have ever wondered how to connect what you do at university with what you have done in the workplace. If you have been on an International exchange, you can use that experience for this module too. English literature connects with every aspect of human activity, including the workplace. In addition to being a subject that provides you with a great range of transferable skills, it also engages in deepening a person’s social and cultural capital. Literature is about every part of the human experience and this makes it one of the most valuable degrees to possess as it help shape a person’s identity, as a broad range of ideas are examined through a thousand years of English Literature. Literature necessary engages with the world of paid work and this module helps you examine those links as well as gain credit for work that you do. The CV and covering letter you will create can be used, and reused, after your degree, adapting to the needs of the jobs you apply for. This module requires you to complete 35 hours of work in any field, full or part time, by the end of your degree. The 35 hours worked do not have to be consecutive and might be excerpts from periods with various employers. Students with more limited CVs are encouraged to aim for work experience in areas that will aid disenfranchised people or are at prominent companies. Doing well in this module will be achieved through ambition; evidence of analysis in your work journal and having a tight and interesting covering letter and CV. This is potentially the most useful module that you will take as it will help you earn money and to apply for employment after university.
View the full module definitionThis module introduces you to a range of C20th and C21st literary representations of exile. To be in exile is to be banished from one’s home, to be displaced and/or estranged from one’s country, family, community, and even one’s self. Exile takes many forms: it can be literal or metaphorical; it can be enforced or self-imposed. Through close readings of novels, graphic novels, poetry, autobiography, and short stories, many of which were written by authors in exile, you will explore various forms of exile writing and consider various conditions and contexts of exile, including politics, race, sexuality, gender and disability. At the start of the module, you will be introduced to a range of theories of exile; you will explore these theories each week in relation to the selected literary texts and related themes of memory, home, identity, community, nostalgia, self, and language.
View the full module definitionThe Romantic period heralded not only the beginnings of the Modern world, but it also looked towards futures and ideals that humans have not yet obtained: slavery still exists, and yet it was banned in this period; Britain passed the first animal rights legislation in Law, but species are still disappearing and the human relationship with other animals remains uneasy. This was a period in which old ways were sometimes driven out and everything seemed up for grabs. Even time was altered. In revolutionary France the old 24-hour clock disappeared, making way for a new decimal clock with 100 minutes in the hour, 10 hours in the day, 10 days in the week and three weeks in the month. This module will help you to engage in fresh critical thinking about ideas that you might never have imagined as well as your position within society. Ideals examined include: Human perfectibility; Veganism; Animal Rights; Women’s rights; Children’s rights; Slavery; Human stratification; Disenfranchisement; the Natural Environment; the purpose of life; jealousy; the Imagination.
View the full module definitionIn this module you'll look at a range of texts written in the last 10 years, examining formal and thematic issues and the relationships between them. You'll consider narrative experimentation and the recycling of old stories and forms; the representation of and return to history; posthumanism and the limits of the human; globalisation and technology. The module will invite you to consider the power and role of literature in contemporary society and the impact of literary prize culture on publishing and publicity. It will encourage you to reflect upon literary developments that have led to 21st-century writing and thus the texts’ relationship to those studied on other modules on the degree. Since there is inevitably an absence of established critical texts on the contemporary works studied, you'll consider alternative sources of critical opinion (academic journals, the internet, broadsheet and broadcast journalism), existing relevant theoretical material and the ways in which new novels demand and shape new criticism. Each seminar will begin with one or more student presentations incorporating close reading, a thematic focus and critical issue. The presentations will be followed by close reading and discussion of related texts in the seminar group. These activities will allow you to develop your analytical skills as well as your abilities in communicating the research and analysis that you will apply to the literatures under discussion. Working with other students in class you will develop your social capital and critical skills in whole and small group discussions. You will develop your sense of identity as a critical and adaptable thinker, problem-solver, researcher and creative agent as you apply theoretical material to the primary literatures under discussion.
View the full module definitionThis module explores the importance and significance of computer-mediated communication, digital media and contemporary communication methods. It explores how new technologies have changed the way we communicate with others. You'll be introduced to a wide range of theories and theoretical and analytical frameworks. As well as critical sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, this will also include more pragmatic approaches to the study of digital communication. You'll understand how these approaches could be meaningfully used to analyse real and authentic digital texts. The key employability skill developed in this module is the development of digital communication skills, which are of contemporary relevance and popularity
View the full module definitionIn this module, you'll take as a starting point the need to be critical about literature written for young audiences, including early years and YA fiction. You'll read children’s literature primarily as literature, instead of as a contributing factor towards childhood development. Children’s books have been controversial since their inception. Your special focus on this module will be to investigate a historical sweep of controversial books, including banned ones, and the reasons behind their censorship. We'll explore primary texts from the ‘Golden Age’ of children’s literature in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries and form more contemporary works. You'll engage with changing historical constructs of childhood and the generic fluidity of children’s and fantasy literature.
View the full module definitionThis module will encourage you to examine and explore teaching and leading participatory workshops in drama and the performing arts. You'll gain practical experience and skills that can be applied as a practicing professional in educational, professional and community contexts. The module will also equip you with theoretical and methodological knowledge relevant to a workshop leader and enable you to practice and develop confidence in delivering effective and well-prepared sessions. Topic areas may include philosophies of education, the sociological and psychological elements of arts pedagogy and the variety of contexts for drama and performing arts workshop education. You'll be expected to reflect on the responsibilities of leadership in creative contexts and develop enhanced skills for future employability. You'll develop skills in independent learning, research and communication of process and product throughout the module. Your assessment will comprise live workshop facilitation, in which you'll lead aspects of a prepared workshop (approximately 15 minutes) and a 1,000-word critical refection that evaluates and contextualises your workshop facilitation. As part of the module, you might be invited to identify a work placement as a workshop facilitator. This can be undertaken either in ‘sandwich’ mode during the semester or in a ‘block’ during the Easter vacation. The nature of your involvement in the placement should contribute to your ongoing reflection as well as your final, assessed workshop facilitation.
View the full module definitionOn this module you'll explore a range of contemporary performance and live art practices that are challenging, often controversial and sometimes disturbing. You'll examine how the body can be explicitly staged in performance art and the ways in which it can be a vehicle for expressing identity positions that are marginalised within dominant western culture. As such, you'll encounter contemporary performance practices that articulate racial, gender, transgender, queer, disabled and refugee identity positions. You'll consider the ethical implications of this practice, its relationship to its audience and its effectiveness as a strategy of resistance to mainstream stereotypes. Content may include the extremism of live art by Franko B, Ron Athey, Kira O’Reilly and Marina Abramovic; activist interventions by Richard Dedemonici and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping; representations of race in Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B; queer identities in Split Britches’ Belle Reprieve; transgender performance by Heather Cassils and the representation of disability in dance works by Bill Shannon. In seminars, you'll explore the relationships between performance, the body and identity through a combination of videos, web material, reviews, interviews and critical essays from major theorists in the field. Your assessment will comprise a 3,000-word essay, with advance formative assessment by tutorial appointments to discuss your plans, arguments and case-studies. The practitioners that you'll study may deploy shock-tactics in the delivery of their work - you'll be expected to be intellectually curious, ask questions about this work and be open to new ideas, practices and processes.
View the full module definitionKnowledge of a foreign language can be a major asset both in your academic and professional life. The Anglia Language Programme offers you the opportunity to study a foreign language as part of your course.