BSc International Disaster Management and Humanitarian Response and Spanish / Course details

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.

• 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 understand the attributes required to study IDMHR and develop a toolkit of wellbeing for encountering difficult subjects. 
• To acquire the practical skills required to succeed at Manchester and get a job.

• Compile a short annotated bibliography on one humanitarian topic using academic sources. 
• Identify, analyse and contrast academic arguments and develop an ability to summarise academic arguments orally and applied through annotated bibliographies. 
• Plan university-level essays with a clear structure and coherent argument. 
• Understand the aims of academic presentations as alternative communication mechanisms to different audiences. 
• Plan university-level presentations as individuals and groups. This is taught through detailed presentation skills and the requirement to develop research skills based on one IDMHR scholar.

• Through the annotated bibliography, students will learn how to discriminate between highly relevant and highly valuable challenging reading, and peripheral or less rigorous styles of writing.
• Organisation of ideas in writing and presentations by designing a detailed essay plan and creating a formative non-assessed group presentation.

• 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.
• Understand essay-writing techniques related to the analysis of a specific question, construction of arguments, assessment and deployment of evidence through a practical tutorial
• Participation in seminar discussion and collaborative learning.

Students will have the opportunity to develop interpretation and argumentation skills, orally . They will gain experience of working with others and presenting to academic staffto peers. Students will develop research and project management skills throughout the course. The skills acquired on this course will be of use for all their future assessments at HCRI and in other course units at university.