MSc Education

This course aims to advance your understanding of UK and international education to progress your career in education contexts. On completion of the course, students will be able to:

• engage in innovative and creative approaches that impact the field of Education across sectors;
• adopt socially intelligent practices in Education, become critically literate in a range of education studies, including Digital Pedagogies, Curriculum, and Leadership;
• demonstrate digital specialisms, drawing directly from learning in digital literacies;
• enact responsible practices with regard to a wide range of issues in education, within the overarching theme of social justice;
• encourage positive change across the Education sector locally and internationally.

If you’re interested in studying a module from this course, the Postgraduate Certificate or the Postgraduate Diploma then please email Graduate Admissions to discuss your course of study.

Our staff routinely keep abreast of changing cultural and education climates, and the ongoing development of pedagogies, to meet the developing needs of the student body.

The Masters in Education is taught via a blended learning approach, including face-to-face seminars and lectures, digital platforms and online lecturer support and feedback throughout the course.

You will benefit from specific learning opportunities, created to encourage development in teamwork, communication, interpersonal skills, creativity and problem-solving, skills that employers value. These quality learning experiences are underpinned by international scholarly perspectives and approaches that enable you to facilitate and assimilate knowledge via your own and others’ cultural lenses and language practices.

The innovative pedagogies employed in the Education Subject Group at Stirling, critically engage with Universal Design for Learning methodologies, suggested to be particularly effective for language learners and students with diverse needs, diagnosed or not.

Specifically, said pedagogical approaches include:

• encouraging students to adopt translanguaging practices for learning, where students will be encouraged to learn in their own language(s), whilst reporting back in English. Specifically, students will be encouraged to draw from sources derived from their country of origin, in order to support deep learning, consolidation of course content and intercultural lenses in learning;
• encouragement of non-anglo-centric approaches to knowledge exchange, including sharing of international scholarly knowledge and cultural experiences, to enhance and develop further international perspectives on education;
• explicit guidelines and expectations around academic writing, assessment and plagiarism;
• clear expectations for engagement (turn-taking for all, for example);
• SLS induction event and use of SLS resources specifically for OS students;
• flexible approaches to assessment, including critical approaches to ‘authentic assessment’, enabling students to produce written / oral pieces and digital artefacts that create learning outcomes that are applicable to the workplace;
• drop-in / Q+A sessions to enable students to gain face-to-face formative feedback and guidance;
• recorded lectures with worksheets, points for recap, consolidation and progression;
• online lectures in headlined sections, to enable iterative learning opportunities;
• routine chunking of all materials and delivery, where structure of seminar / lecture / workshop delivery is designed to include regular plenary and mini-plenaries;
• Peer mentoring and buddy schemes, to support learning and consolidation.

Assessment will be both formative and summative, with summative assessments taking the form of written reports, enquiry-based projects, presentations and digital artefacts. There are no formal exams associated with this course

There are varied summative, multi-modal assignments across modules, including written, verbal and digital outputs, incorporating presentations, enquiry-based projects, written assignments and digital artefacts, alongside formative assessment to scaffold learning and outcome.

All modules within the course are run face to face, with blended elements, apart from two modules, designed to be run online due to their content:  

• Pedagogies of Technology
• Learn, Work and Lead Critically with AI & Data

Most modules will include 24 scheduled hours and 176 independent study hours, totalling 200 hours overall. The Dissertation module includes 15 scheduled hours, 10 hours supervised and 575 independent study hours: a total of 600 hours.

Dr Kay Sidebottom

kay.sidebottom@stir.ac.uk

Module Lead, What is Education?: Dr. John I’Anson

John is currently Principal Investigator for a Scottish Government research project (2018-21) that inquires into how teachers promote equity in schools through translating theory into practice and supporting colleagues in mentoring relations. He currently lectures on the Initial Teacher Education (ITE), Professional Education Masters, and Master of Education Research programmes within the Faculty of Social Sciences. His book, Schooling Indifference (Routledge, 2017), written with Alison Jasper, explores ways in which cultural difference might be engaged within education. He has also written on educational theory, inclusion, and children's rights. John was until recently Convenor of the Research in Children's Rights network for the European Conference on Educational Research. He is currently Depute Director of the Centre for Child Wellbeing and Protection at the University of Stirling.  

Module Lead, Education and Social Justice and Curriculum Pathway Lead: Dr Kay Sidebottom

Kay is a Lecturer in Education and Director for the MSc Education. She also supervises Masters and doctoral students across a range of childhood and education-related topics. Kay’s current research explores how teachers can work with posthuman ideas to facilitate meaningful and disruptive education spaces for our complex times. With a background in community and adult education, her pedagogical specialisms include critical, radical and anarchist education, arts-based practice and community philosophy.

Digital Modular Pathway Lead: Dr Terrie-Lynn Thompson

Terrie-Lynn is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the School of Education, University of Stirling. She holds a PhD from the University of Alberta in Canada and completed a SSHRC-funded post-doctoral fellowship at Athabasca University (Canada’s open university). Her program of research focuses on how professional work-learning practices and pedagogical spaces are changing globally, as new web and mobile technologies are increasingly integrated into work and everyday life routines. 

Education Leadership Pathway Lead: Dr Aileen Ireland

Aileen is a Research Assistant based at the University of Stirling. She also works as a Lecturer and researcher in the field of professional education. Aileen’s own research relates to the use of technology in teaching and learning practices, adopting a posthuman perspective to her work.

Commonwealth Shared Scholarships

These scholarships are for candidates from developing Commonwealth countries, looking to study selected postgraduate Masters courses. Find out if you could be eligible for a Commonwealth Shared Scholarship.

If you’re domiciled in the UK, you can typically apply to your relevant funding body for help with living costs. This usually takes the form of student loans, grants or bursaries, and the amount awarded depends upon your personal circumstances and household income.

International (including EU) students won’t normally be able to claim living support through SAAS or other UK public funding bodies. You should contact the relevant authority in your country to find out if you’re eligible to receive support.

Find out about the cost of living for students at Stirling

We aim to be as flexible as possible, and offer a wide range of payment methods - including the option to pay fees by instalments. Learn more about how to pay

The Masters in Education at the University of Stirling will provide you with a range of hard skills, including digital learning, and soft skills in teamwork, communication, interpersonal skills, creativity and problem-solving, which international and UK based employers will find attractive.