Integrated Professional Development Unit
This unit provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate the coherence and synthesis of the units taken and relate them to their professional setting.
Unit aims:
- To demonstrate the coherence of the units taken in relation to an area of professional practice
- To analyse and evaluate specific issues of professional practice in the light of wellbeing and human development
- To identify circumstances in which the knowledge acquired in the course of the programme can be put into practice, and how this can be done.
Unit content:
This unit is tailor-made to the needs of each individual student. It will involve three stages:
- Identifying the areas of professional practice most affected by what has been learned.
- Analysing the difference that the acquired knowledge has on analysis and action.
- Writing up a 2,500 word reflective piece on what has been learned and how that knowledge can be applied in one’s professional practice.
Example of what this unit would involve for, say, a Poverty Reduction Team Leader at a UNDP country office:
- Identify how poverty evaluation is currently undertaken.
- Analyze the extent to which what has been learned about wellbeing and human development may affect the way poverty is evaluated in the country (e.g. how to account for the importance of relationships and voice in a person’s experience of wellbeing)
- Write a reflective piece on how all the units taken in the course fit together and can be applied in the specific area of poverty evaluation and reduction.
Example of what this unit would involve for, say, an NGO worker with indigenous communities:
- Identify how indigenous conceptions of development interact with that of other development actors, and how specific indigenous conceptions of wellbeing are from that of Western literature.
- Analyze the extent to which what has been learned in the course affects one’s work with indigenous communities.
- Write a reflective piece on how all the units taken in the course fit together and can be applied in the specific area of indigenous development.
There will be an opportunity for students to share their experience of integrating the acquired knowledge in their professional practice through on-line seminars.
This unit:
- Is assessed by a 2,500 word essay.
- Is taken as the final unit of the Postgraduate certificate in Professional Development (Wellbeing & Human Development), typically during May-June of year 2 of study.
- Is taken only by those taking the above award (and therefore does not count towards a Diploma or MSc Wellbeing in Public Policy and International Development).
Unit convenors: Sarah White and Séverine Deneulin