General provisions

The course is part of the Master's Programme in Sociology of Education and the Master's Programme in Educational Sciences with a Specialisation in Sociology of Education. It can also be given as an independent course.

Entry requirements

A Bachelor's degree corresponding to at least 180 credits, including at least 90 credits from a discipline pertaining to the social sciences or the humanities.

Learning outcomes

After completion of the course the student will be able to:

• give an overview of and summarise some of the fundamental political, economic, cultural and social changes during the modern period (ca. 1800-2000)
• discuss and compare different theoretical perspectives on history on the societal changes in the modern period used in sociological and historical research on education
• identify a contextualised research question that contributes to an increase of our understanding of the function of education in various modern societies, and present this problem and its historical and theoretical context in a concise and comprehensible way.

Content

In this course, students will learn how to contextualise their research questions and discuss and analyse educational institutions from a theoretical and historical perspective. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the historical problems, processes and theoretical concepts connected to the modern historical era during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course focuses especially on the rise and development of modern social formations, the modern state and institutions, the concepts of power and social class.

Instruction

The course consists of a number of lectures and seminars focusing on specific themes and questions. Seminar discussions will be based on a mandatory literature list. To achieve the learning outcomes, students are expected to actively participate in seminar discussions with prepared contributions regarding literature and with constructive comments to ongoing discussions.

Assessment

Assessment will be based upon shorter seminar assignments and a final paper in which the student contextualises his or her research question. The student has to defend the final paper in class.