BSc International Disaster Management & Humanitarian Response

This course is about transforming students from A-level learners into independent scholars. It does this by working through a key set of skills, ranging from identifying appropriate academic sources and scholarship, through reading academic texts critically, to producing the required style, tone and level of critical analysis in academic writing and presentations. Students will work with a member of the academic staff in tutorials to study their specialism with them; so that they can understand how disaster management and humanitarian knowledge and scholarly practice work side by side, and why the key skill set they are learning is essential to this.

HCRI11071 this module is only available to students on the IDM&HR degree programme,(please check your programme structure for further details).Year 1, semester 1 core on BSc International Disaster Management and Conflict Response

 The aims of this course are:

• To manage the leap between school-level work and university level work.
• To get to know one of the lecturers well, to understand what they do and understand their approaches.
• To experience lots of varieties of disaster management and humanitarianism that won't have been experienced in other modules
• To acquire the practical skills required to succeed at Manchester and get a job.

 

Students will have the opportunity to develop interpretation and argumentation skills, both written and oral. They will gain experience of working with others and presenting to staff. Students will develop research and project management skills throughout the course. They will develop skills to help them apply the skills developed from this course to all of their future assessments at university

• Compile and present an annotated bibliography. 
• Identify, analyse and contrast academic arguments.
• Plan university-level essays with a clear structure and coherent argument. 
• Compose introductions to essays and conclusions to essays
• Understand the aims of academic presentations as alternative communication mechanisms to different audiences.
• Plan university-level presentations as individuals and groups.
• Learn how to engage with difficult subjects in the classroom setting.

• Discrimination between highly relevant and highly valuable challenging reading, and peripheral or less rigorous styles of writing.
• Organisation of ideas in writing and presentations

 

• Information management skills, requiring evaluation, synthesis, and record-keeping.
• Research skills, including planning, prioritisation of tasks, identification and location of primary and secondary sources, evaluation of findings.
• Essay-writing skills related to the analysis of a specific question, construction of arguments, assessment and deployment of evidence, writing style.
• Participation in seminar discussion and collaborative learning through virtual seminars.

Assessment Task	Formative or Summative	Length	Weighting
Portfolio of reflective learning and individual weekly tasks To include formative elements with feedback in tutorials – submit week 8	Summative	2,000 words	70%
Essay- submit early Jan	Summative	1,000 words	30%

Feedback method	Formative or Summative
Written feedback on assignments	Summative
Verbal feedback seminars	Formative
Verbal and peer feedback on practice group presentations and practice portfolio pieces in the tutorials	Formative