Assessment
Assessment on the MA in Leadership for Sustainability takes place throughout the programme. Over the course of the two years you complete six pieces of written coursework: five on an individual basis and one group-based project. There are no formal examinations.
The coursework assignments are designed to track your learning, so most are called 'learning papers'. You choose your own topics to explore, in line with your personal learning agenda and your specific interests. The areas selected can relate either to an area of your professional working life, or to your involvement in other voluntary or community-based activities.
"It allows me to apply what I am learning to my real-time work situations: I'm taking what I'm learning directly back to my employer."
Mark Atherton
Northwest Regional Development Agency
For each paper you are asked to report on and review your intellectual and practice-based learning, and the links between the two. In encouraging you to move between action and reflection in this way, the writing of the learning papers and assignments mirrors the MA’s action research approach – and the process also helps you articulate how your thinking is developing.
Iterative process of development
During the first year of the programme you will be given feedback on your initial ideas, activities and writing from tutors and your learning peers. By bringing along your work-in-progress to the workshop sessions and participating in online discussions, you are able to draw on the ideas and responses received before formally submitting an Assessment Portfolio of your finished work at the end of the first year (and again at the end of the second). You will be expected to take account of this feedback as you prepare and submit subsequent assignments, since this provides an important cycle of development.
To enhance the process of reflection, each participant also undertakes an individual Learning Review of the degree experience after each full year of study. This is to allow you to gain a broader perspective of the learning process than is possible through the individual assignments alone.
Schedule of assessment
The work you will be required to complete by the end of Year 1 consists of:
- two individual Learning Papers (3,500-5,000 words each)
- a Learning Review (3,500 words)
- a Group Project (10,000 words)
In Year 2, you complete two further pieces of assessment:
- an individual Dissertation (15,000-20,000 words)
- a Learning Review (3,500-5,000 words)
You start scoping out the area for your dissertation during the first workshop in Year 2, and hand in the dissertation approximately a month after the final workshop.
How the work is assessed
In evaluating your assessed work, we apply five quality criteria, specifically looking at your capacity to:
- draw on and integrate both theory and practice
- examine ideas from a critical perspective
- develop action research practice in relation to leadership, change and sustainability
- demonstrate developments of practice and active use of feedback
- situate your work in the domain of leadership, change and sustainability
