Welcome to the Education and Community Development Programme Leaders Blog.

I set up this blog last week in response to the first of our Education and Community Development Seminars. The speaker at the first seminar was Dr Sanjay Sharma whose subject was Critical Pedagogy.

I hope the blog will open another space for critical pedagogy. In addition, like the seminar series, I hope the blog will provide programme leadership to current students and to students planning to enter this exciting field of academic study.

Hopefully I can inspire you to invest in your studies with us at UEL both for the rewards the investment will bring, and out of sheer curiosity about the subject you are studying. In particular, I hope that my blog will make you curious about how, through education we can 'develop' our communities, locally and globally.

Having opened the space last week, I think I was a bit confused about what to put in it. On reflection, I realise that I wanted to write this blog because I so rarely have any contact with many EDUCOM students (which is how we tend to refer to Education and Community Development students) through teaching. This is because I do not lead or teach on any of your core modules at present.

The modules that I lead and teach on are: ED1015 Diaspora Communities in the UK and ED1010 Children in Their Social Contexts at level one; and ED3022 Gender Security and Education for All at level three. These are all options on the programme. EDUCOM students don't have to take them but they are among the options you can select (see programme structure for more information about cores and options).

I have been leading ED1011 Children and Languages as well, but my colleague Ms Ratha Perumal will be leading that module in future. Ratha used to lead Diaspora Communities in the UK before she went on sabbatical this semester with funds she had won for her research on learner autonomy. This arrangement better reflects our different areas of knowledge, experience and interest.

I know some of you because you are taking, or have taken modules that I lead and because I may have read some of your application forms. If I have read your application forms, it is because as well as being programme leader for Education and Community Development, I am also the Admissions Tutor for the Cass School of Education undergraduate programmes. I think these two roles (Programme Leader for Education and Community Development and Undergraduate Admissions Tutor) go well together as the admissions tutor role, is a community development role that involves welcoming undergraduate students into the Cass School of Education which is a community that includes students doing postgraduate degrees in research and teacher training as well as undergraduates.

The Cass School of Education is just one of the University of East London's 10 Schools. The others are: Architecture and the Visual Arts (AVA), the Business School, the School of Combined Honours, the School of Computing, Information Technology and Engineering, the Graduate School, the School of Health and Bioscience, the School of Law, the School of Psychology, the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies. Together these schools provide students at UEL with an exciting range of subjects to explore and enjoy. They make UEL an environment that stimulates my imagination and inspires me with hope that solutions to a range of contemporary challenges can be found.

I should have met all single honours students at Induction when you started at UEL and we will meet again on that day in July when continuing single honours students come in to choose their modules for the next year. Apart from that, I have very little contact with most of you so I hope this blog provides another space for discussing the programme with you. I will try to keep you informed about forthcoming changes to the programme and suggest events to attend. I will also tell you about volunteering and research opportunities and try to inform you about all sorts of resources that you may find useful.

I hope you will also use the space provided by the blog to dialogue with me about the programme. You may also have some other good ideas about how to use this space.

In addition to the 145 students currently studying for the single honors BA Education and Community Development, there are also a lot of students combining Education and Community Development with other subjects. There is a total of 31 EDUCOM combined honours degrees!

As I said, it is because I don't actually meet with many of you studying Education and Community Development as combined honors that I want to use this blog to talk with you about the programme you are studying. I want to use the space to explain the way the programme works and answer your questions about the programme, studying for the programme and making decisions about what to do next.

I also hope that the blog will be a way of staying in touch with the wider community that starts with UEL's other Schools, where some of you are also studying, and includes the wide range of individuals and organisations who are our co-learners because they provide placement and volunteering opportunities as well as subjects for us to research.

If you have read through this posting please leave me a comment, question or suggestion. Let me know how I can support you with studying for this programme. I am looking forward to hearing from you. If you don't want to leave a comment on the blog, you can always send me an email at a.m.ogunsola@uel.ac.uk instead.