Hi!!
After a quick poll on Instagram over the weekend it seemed that you guys wanted a blog post on the Open Uni course I did a few weeks ago, so here it is.
I took a course on Youth Justice in Society. The course was totally free and part of the 'Open Learn' section on their website. They're a great thing to do if you have a couple of hours free a week and want to earn yourself some certificates or badges.
The Youth Justice course was super interesting, I was able to look into the systems in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as how class, race and gender played a part in the justice system. Although not directly related to teaching it was good to learn about the effects that going through the system can have on children, as well as concepts that could be transferred to teaching like the phrase "Give a dog a bad name and you hang him". Much of the course was based around prevention and intervention so I was intrigued to learn how the system helps young people who have committed an offence, as well as how children's upbringings and cultures can effect their daily life.
There were some really though provoking questions such as should the age of criminal responsibility be raised, and if so to what age? Concepts like adultifcation were also covered. For those of you wondering what that means, the example I was given was that prosecuting children in criminal courts will always involve a degree of adultifcation: although children know the difference between big rights and big wrongs, they don't necessarily always have the capacity to understand where their plea will take them.
There were 8 sessions in total for this course and each session had a quiz at the end to test how much you understood. Then the middle and final sessions had compulsory quizzes that I had to pass to earn my badge. I really would recommend having a browse of their site if you have some spare time, I'll drop the link here: Free courses - OpenLearn - Open University. There is such a wide variety, I have just started one on youth mental health now. There is absolutely no time limit to completing them so you could spend half an hour once a week for as long as you needed to complete one!
Hopefully this is the insight you were all after and has given you a bit of detail on what the courses entail, if you do get the chance to have a go at one- have fun!!
Comments