Module Breakdown – Politics (Power, Freedom and the State)

Over the next few months or so, I will be releasing a post breaking down each module I have done/am doing in my first year of university. This is so as to give an insight to prospective students interested in my degree (Law with Politics) and also because I actually find it fascinating. It’s intriguing to see how someone doing the same degree as me can essentially be doing things differently. For example, I know some people do Tort Law in the first year of their law degree whereas, at Bangor University (the university I attend), I do Tort Law in the second year of my degree.

In terms of the structure of these posts, they will all follow the same guideline:

• Content
• Lectures
• Seminars
• Assessments
• My overall thoughts

The first module I will be talking about is my Politics module called Power, Freedom and the State. This was a module that I completed in Semester One.

Content

Power, Freedom, and the State is what I would describe as an introductory module to Politics. We looked at various theories discussing key questions such as “What is Politics?” and “What are political systems?” We also looked at other things such as the role of the state, security, democracy, and more.

We also looked at regimes, nations, globalization, political culture, the role of the media, political parties, the constitution, assemblies, and a lot of sub-topics within that.

If you’ve studied Politics before, you’ll know that quite a few subject fields appear. When I was participating in this module, I realised that there were quite a few topics I had looked at previously in different subjects. Sociology and History were definitely two of the main subjects that cropped up through this module, which I realised due to taking these subjects as an A-Level. In addition to these two, Law was also predominant throughout. As someone taking a Law degree with Politics, this definitely helped with reinforcing my knowledge.

Lectures

Lectures occurred once a week in a two hour slot. Each lecture was split in two, with a five to ten minute break in the middle. This meant two topics were discussed in the two hour lecture. For example, in one week we looked at executives and leadership in the first half of the lecture, and then we looked at assemblies in the second half of the lecture.

The lectures were very much like how you expect a university lecture. What I mean by that is there is little to no interaction. It’s definitely a situation in which the lecturer stands in front of the room and gives out information.

Another thing to mention is all of the lectures were in person so I can’t comment on if this would be any different if it was via blackboard.

Seminars

Seminars in this module happened once a week and they were all an hour long. Each seminar, as expected, had a lot of preparation involved. Sometimes it involved reading an article set by the seminar leader, other times we had to research something, such as one of the party conferences that happened. We were also given guidance on an assignment but I’ll come to that shortly.

Each seminar was essentially an extension of what we were looking at in the lecture. For example, in a lecture, we looked at parties and party systems, and the seminar that followed it was all about whether political parties are dying.

The seminar groups were small in size, allowing group discussions and interaction to take place. This is to be expected with seminars, where discussion is important. The seminars took place in person, although there was also an option to take part online via blackboard.

Assessments

In this module, there were four assessments that I had to complete: three online tests via Blackboard and an essay assignment. The three tests were worth 20% each, making it 60% in total, and the essay assignment was worth 40%.

The three online tests were strictly to do with the content we were taught during the module. They were multiple-choice questions strictly to do with what we had learned in lectures. The first test was to do with the first seven lectures, the second test was to do with the next six lectures and the third test was to do with the remaining six lectures.

For the essay assignment, we had to pick a country and write about the type of state it is, who governs it and how it is governed. We were given a choice as to which country we could choose like I mentioned previously and it was a 2000 word essay.

My overall thoughts

I really enjoyed this module. Politics has always been a big interest of mine. There was definitely some content that I have previously studied but it was still a challenging and intriguing module nonetheless. If someone was doing this module with no prior knowledge, it is a great introductory module into Politics which I think is really good.

I am really proud with how I have done on this module. At the time of writing, I don’t know my overall mark in the module as I have not received my results on how I did in the essay. However, I did really well in the online tests which will boost my mark up hopefully.

I hope you enjoyed this post! I will have my other module breakdown posts out in the not too distant future.

Beth