The unit appears to have gone downhill quite significantly since the previous reviews. The first few weeks were fine really, some of the language used by Pouloome came of quite ablest but the content was relatively interesting. After we moved away from the specific disabilities (only 5 were looked at and 2 were done in one week, a lot of really important and relevant disabilities weren't included which was disappointing) and onto policy and the more thematic weeks Pouloome's recordings (still just inserted into the slides) were literally just her reading what was written, which was usually just dot points. Working on the case study (60%) was tough because just 1 sentence was provided for each section about what was required and the word count of 2000 was not enough to satisfy all the requirements, meaning important information had to be cut out. The real issues however were when the marks came back, with a not insignificant portion of the course getting exactly 10 marks lower than they usually do. It's so weird that it was exactly 10 marks, and when this was bought up on the discussion board Pouloome got very defensive. Worse still is that it was only some of the course that were marked that way, with a lot of people finding it to be marked fairly so your marks were up to the luck of the marker draw. (apparently almost all the results were passes and credits with just a few distinctions and fails which says a lot about the marking and teaching) Then, of course there is the placement component. Very little information was given in the lead up to the placement, with a last minute scramble to get everything in order. Pouloome said she would do a course wide zoom meeting to go over what had to be done but she didn't. Then with just one week out from our placement block, literally 1 minute before school allocations opened a huge chunk of the unit got told that they hadn't been placed at a school. This is a big mess that I won't go into but I will say that the unit is over now and myself and many others have still yet to receive a placement. Related to this is how we apparently had a guy who was organising the placement aspect of the unit, and i say apparently because the only reason i know this is because his name is on ilearn. You would think that with such major issues in the one aspect of the unit that you run you would at least introduce yourself, but nope never heard a peep from this guy the whole time. Finally, the last few weeks of the unit completely deviate from inclusive education and have a 2 week intro to behaviour management. John was really good and I enjoyed his content a lot but those weeks could have been utilised to learn more about other specific disabilities and save the behaviour management for the unit specifically based on it.

It wasn't anything amazing, nor bad. The COVID-19 really messed up what the unit should've been, so it's not the unit's fault. You have 2 tasks: 1 major case study on a student with a disability and 1 exam. The case study was supposed to be based off when you go into practicals (visiting schools), but that was cancelled for us, so we had to make it up based on our knowledge. It was marked well considering, and there's nothing they could have done despite whining from certain students. The exam also having been made online due to covid, was pretty straightforward. This would be a really interesting unit when you're not in a global pandemic. But otherwise, you'll find yourself not doing much work other than for the 2 previously mentioned tasks.

The content itself wasn't that difficult and could be interesting if taught well (like EDST1000/EDST100 was). [Assignments] ∙ Practical: see COVID-19 section ∙ Research Report: very vague instructions; the whole cohort was up in iLearn panicking about what we should have been doing [Lectures] ∙ Poulomee's slides are confusing (e.g. suddenly switching fonts, American spelling, caps lock; just bad formatting overall) which is kind of ironic seeing how she wrote that we shouldn't be doing that in inclusive education. ∙ Poor transitions between topics (going back and forth, random quiz slides that cut between topics) ∙ Taught us to use the term 'Intellectual Disabilities' instead of 'Mental Re**rdation' (for obvious reasons) and then goes on to use MR in her slides??? [COVID-19] ∙ Poulomee didn't upload any lectures and instead added her reading the slides aloud (wasn't helpful) ∙ Didn't get to do our practical and eventually we will have to make up for this in Dec/Jan