What course to choose OU? Education or Eng Lang/Lit/Creative writing

[Hamsternautss]

I want to train to be a primary teacher (currently a TA) so I've been trying to decide what to study with the OU in October for quite a while now so that eventually I can do a pgce or scitt afterwards.

I am extremely passionate about children's welfare and education (I have a ND child and I see the struggles both child and schools face) and the course content for education studies looks really interesting.

Equally I've always been a very fast and keen reader and loved studying eng lang & lit at a level. I enjoy reading the classics and picking the language apart and analysing and comparing texts and themes. A lang & lit combo looks equally interesting but I just keep changing my mind on what I should opt for.

I'm pretty sure I want to teach at primary level but studying english lang would keep the door open incase I wanted to change to secondary.

Has anyone done either of these courses qnd can give me any feedback? I've only got a few weeks to decide and just can't settle. Even if I did an open degree and did half of education studies and half lang or lit I would still be in a pickle when it came to choosing the modules so I think I'd like focus on one field only.

Primary and secondary are extremely different - if this is what is driving your choice then I’d recommend trying to get some shadowing experience, many local schools will offer this. It’s not that common though not impossible to crossover

Lang would have you more flexible as linguists are less common as English teachers than Lit grads imo but you could teach Lang or Lit with that degree. You’d need the degree then a years training (pgce etc). Do you get QTS through the BEd?

The BA in education studies was brilliant for me, I loved it all, learned so much and it opened a lot of doors for me. I decided not to do a PGCE in the end but work in education in a different way.

But you need to decided primary or secondary. If you want secondary then do the lang/lit as you can't get into secondary at all with the BA.

Meant to also say most of my friends from my degree went on to primary teaching. This was about 12 years ago and all are still happily teaching.

No thoughts on being a teacher, but I have just done a Literature and Philosophy degree at uni (at 46). In the Literature part of my degree I did creative writing at all levels, prose and poetry modules. And in September I am doing an MA in Literature (creative writing).

Creative writing at degree level isn't just writing creative stuff, you still have to do a decent amount of critical analysis. The texts we work with are very contemporary, 2015 onwards usually and there is a fair amount of research involved. Which can be tricky as the texts tend to be too contemporary to have had much written about them. I absolutely love it but it's not necessarily as 'soft' an option as what people assume. Other students doing different modules to me have a similar amount of critical analysis to do, but not the creative stuff. Creative writing also really benefits from a network of other students critiquing your work and I am not sure how effective that would be in an OU setting.

Many arts based OU degrees have A111 and A112 as the level 1 modules both of which contain some Eng Lit and also creative writing. So starting with these doesn’t commit you to one particular path.