Secondary Initial Teacher Education Art and Design - Postgraduate Certificate in Education

The course is part of the Department's programme for Initial Teacher Training. Units studied are:

• Enabling Learning
• Meeting Curriculum Challenges
• Becoming a Teacher

These units are studied in both the school and the University-based parts of the course, the work on each site being complementary.

The course is designed to help you develop an awareness of the purposes and possibilities of different approaches to art and design in the school curriculum. It aims to enable you to develop pupils' ability in the visual and tactile elements of art, including the development of young people's skills to research and use evidence to generate ideas, and to interpret such ideas in practice.

You will learn how to achieve this in accordance with Health and Safety requirements. The course will help you to develop this teaching competence in contexts involving a range of media, in two and three dimensions, and using IT, drawing on the richness of art from different cultures and periods of history.

During the course, consideration will be given to the National Curriculum GCSE and to post-16 courses including AS, A-level, and to the rapidly expanding vocational area of the art and design curriculum. Learning to teach involves a wide range of other skills including the development of young people's ability to communicate and justify their ideas and decisions in art and design, and more generally to develop their language across the curriculum as a whole.

It also involves learning how to assess, report on and record young people's progress and how to recognise under-achievement and exceptional performance in the classroom or art studio. You will have opportunities in both university and school environments to develop these skills as well as those that relate to managing pupil behaviour in order to secure effective learning, both in the classroom and in schools more generally.

Hear what our students think about their time at UWE.

The University continually enhances our offer by responding to feedback from our students and other stakeholders, ensuring the curriculum is kept up to date and our graduates are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need for the real world. This may result in changes to the course. If changes to your course are approved we will inform you.

The course is split between university based study (12 weeks) and school based study (24 weeks). The university based blocks look at educational issues related to Art and Design teaching, and the role of Art and Design in the school curriculum. Examples of sessions include:

• Developing a rationale for teaching Art and Design
• Subject knowledge workshops in a wide range of media, including ceramics, screenprinting and photography
• Writing creative and motivational schemes of work and lesson planning
• Planning a school visit

A comprehensive series of seminars and workshops provides opportunities to extend your understanding of a range of pedagogical methodologies within art and design, such as how best to explain, demonstrate, ask questions, support students' progress in your subject and much more, through a reflective approach to your own practice. You will be introduced to the latest ideas and resources for teaching art and design, share and develop a wide variety of teaching approaches and learning activities and become aware of the wider subject community that is made up of art teachers and art educators through the National Society for Education in Art and Design. You will also have the opportunity to develop your subject knowledge through a range of university based workshops, and will be able to select one new area to investigate and produce a range of personal work for exhibition during the course.

See more details see our full glossary of learning and teaching terms.

Personal support
We recognise that embarking on a new course of study can sometimes be quite a challenging undertaking. You have three main sources of support and information from the University during the course: firstly there is the Group Tutor in their subject area, secondly you are allocated a Personal Tutor and thirdly you can get support on a range of issues from the Department Student Adviser.

In order to pass the course, trainees are required to pass each unit. They are assessed on a number of written assignments and also on classroom practice against the standards specified by the Secretary of State for the award of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS).