Lessons from the Case Study

Going through the three courses in relation to the case study, should help you see that the BACE Programme enables you to develop the knowledge, skills and values required by community educators. Individual courses such as ICE, WWIG and PP1, all contribute in their different ways but fundamentally they develop your capacity to think critically.

Thinking critically

ICE, for example by making connections between the personal and the political, helps you to see the situation from a different perspective; one that does not blame people for the predicament they may be in but points to the importance of contextual factors such as limited employment opportunities or lack of appropriate educational provision. Although it is underpinned by insights from learning theory, WWIG has a more practical focus, for example, in introducing basic ways of working with people in groups. It shows that the young people in Cobblers could be involved in activities that are fun but also educational while offering new experiences and interesting challenges. PP1 focusses on what it means to be a professional worker in a situation like the one at Cobblers. This means thinking carefully about your own work, and always seeking to improve the quality of the learning opportunities being offered, in this case, to the young people. Central to all of this is the place of theory in helping workers to think critically and to act in a more purposeful and informed way.

The place of theory

Classroom discussions help you explore and come to understand ‘theory’ as something that is complex and multi-faceted. The BACE programme is not, therefore, a simple course of instruction in how to be a community educator. Instead, theory can consist of a set of ideas, it may take the form of a justification for views or actions, it may be a basis for action, it can help to explain the world and can provide tools for thinking. Theory may be a system of ideas fully developed into a philosophy or ideology. It can be a school of thought or the conceptual foundations of a subject discipline, such as psychology, economics or sociology. It may also set out paradigms, by which we mean frameworks, for thinking. The training gets you to think about how theory is developed, for example, through analyzing, comparing, contrasting, criticizing and summarizing ideas. Theory and theorizing is essential for practitioners because it underpins, for example, values, policies, procedures and the very work that people do. Theory comes from a variety of sources: books, journals, websites, and course materials, amongst others. Theory is also something that you develop in terms of your own understanding of issues and your approach to the work. A good way of understanding the programme is that it helps you to theorize through developing the habit of constantly reflecting on practice and thinking carefully about all the influences on our work, such as policy directives, funding requirements and limitations, and economic and social factors.

Academic work

The BACE programme involves practice and taught elements. As you will see from the brief information provided about the first year courses, there are various strategies for teaching and learning. Common to all the courses, however, is the need to develop your ability to read critically and to write to a high standard. Writing is important because it helps you to develop your own thinking. More broadly, writing helps to produce the knowledge that is relevant to a field of practice, in a way that can be captured and then shared widely across time and distance, so that it can inform thinking by being discussed and argued about. This business of justifying ideas by arguing about them in public is central to the development of any profession. Subjecting work for critical review by the peer group, is at the heart of academic life.

So writing essays, and other forms of assignment, will be a crucial part of your life at the University of Edinburgh. Writing is a difficult skill to acquire, and involves a great deal of hard work to get it right. We recognise this and provide support and assistance to help you to develop this ability in a number of ways, as you will find on the study page on this site.

CUE has been developed at the University of Edinburgh by John Bamber and Clara O'Shea as part of the Student Recruitment and Admissions 'Transitions' Project in 2006/7. For further information on CUE and on CUE: Community Education contact: John Bamber, Department of HIgher and Community Education, Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 8AQ, Tel.: +44 - (0)131 - 651 6116, E-mail: john.bamber@ed.ac.uk

Website updated: June 19, 2008