Sociological Orientation to Education

This unit is designed both to introduce you to key issues and concepts in the sociology of education and to build the academic reading and writing skills that will enable you to describe and analyse aspects of the social world from competing theoretical perspectives. In this unit you will examine a range of social factors, including socio-economic status, gender and ethnicity, which impact on students’ learning and development, on their access to educational opportunities and on their life chances. You will apply the concept of “sociological imagination” in educational contexts, analyse and interpret a range of sociological texts, and investigate the above mentioned social factors through the “lenses” of competing sociological theories. You will compare and contrast a range of responses to the social factors mentioned above, and examine competing ideological orientations to curriculum and teaching and learning practices; and in this context you will investigate the concepts of learning spaces and learning communities. Just as importantly, in this unit you will also develop competencies in various forms of academic writing – including exposition, analysis, comparison and contrast, and argument; these competencies will be developed in a sequenced way through a series of writing tasks, each of which is designed to be progressively more complex and to incorporate skills introduced in the previous task.