After the preparatory lectures delivered by staff that will give you the knowledge and tools to complete the module, you will be able to attend lectures from practitioners working in various different professions. Previous practitioners have included practitioners and alumni from the public sector eg Benefit Fraud; Prisons and Probation; the voluntary sector eg NACRO and Addaction as well as private providers including Gelders Construction Company.
Attendance is compulsory as you will need to employ skills in discourse analysis in order to evaluate and compare these lectures for your assessment.
The practitioners are encouraged to talk about issues that they believe are important about their work and their experiences, but if they do not talk about issues that you want to know about, you are encouraged to ask them questions. This is why we timetable the practitioner lectures for two hours to enable you to interact with the practitioners. Sometimes practitioners invite you to contact them and will give you their contact details. Please make use of such generous offers as practitioners can often impart valuable information to you about voluntary and paid opportunities that are available in their organisations. You might be interested to know that 85% of jobs are NOT advertised publicly so getting contacts is really useful for when you graduate.
Use of telephones and ipads:
During lectures and seminars, students should turn their phones off. This is particularly important in lectures as incoming messages, even if your phone is on silent, interfere with the acoustic systems in the lecture theatres. This results in distracting noises being heard over the speaker systems. Sometimes students may wish to make use of their phones or tablets to collate notes during lectures and seminars. In this case, the roaming feature should be turned off to prevent the phone interfering with the speaker systems. Whilst we accept and welcome the exciting dimension that mobile technology can bring to the teaching and learning environment, it is absolutely unacceptable for students to use phones or tablets in lectures or seminars, unless this use is directly related to the lecture or seminar content or activity. Buying items on ebay, sending text messages and using emails, Facebook or twitter would normally be seen as unacceptable and disrespectful to staff, visiting speakers and other students in these situations.
You are also asked to listen quietly whilst in lectures, as the acoustic properties of the lecture theatres mean that any conversations are clearly audible to the speaker and other students in the lecture theatre and therefore can be very distracting. Please therefore show respect for your colleagues and the staff in these situations by not talking through lectures.
If students wish to record or video lectures, or photograph whiteboards, they must as a point of courtesy check with the lecturer concerned. Any recording/photography/videoing in seminars must be checked with both staff and the other students in the room. In most cases, staff, practitioners and other students are under no obligation to allow such recording. It is important to note that if you are allowed to record a session, all recordings are for your own personal use only and must not be distributed to others through any medium. Both the University and lecturer concerned own the rights to any recording made of a lecture and also own the rights to the electronic distribution of a lecture. Any unauthorized commercial, or other exploitation of this recorded material is prohibited, and as a form of academic misconduct may result in the University taking disciplinary action against the student(s) concerned.