Description
The Open University
TMA 03
The assignment
Cut-off date: 11th February, 2025
Task: Produce a presentation to advise mental health professionals working in a forensic counselling context on one of the topics outlined below.
In this TMA you will produce a brief (15-minute, 8–14-slides) presentation for mental health professionals about how counselling and forensic psychology can inform us about either (a) power dynamics at play when considering the issue of sexual consent or (b) normativity related to sex and sexuality.
Word limit: 1200 words.
You are required to use PowerPoint in this TMA to create a presentation. There is more information on creating effective presentations at the following links:
Focus of the assignment
TMA 03 is intended to particularly assess your skills of presenting to a professional audience who are not specialists in this area of work. For this assignment you have been asked to provide a brief (15- minute, 8–14-slides) presentation to mental health professionals about one of two topics covered in Block 3 of the module. Therefore, you need to create a set of presentation slides which look good, and which cover the relevant content in a way that would be understandable to mental health professionals who may not have a particular experience in this area. The idea is to draw on your psychological knowledge of the material in Block 3, in a way that supports the points you make in your presentation.
For this assignment you need to pick just one of the two topics to focus on. Whichever you choose to use, the task is the same: to produce a presentation on what counselling and forensic psychology can tell us about this area.
Please be aware that we always provide two possible topics for this TMA because some of the topics covered in this block of DD310 may be challenging for some students. It is therefore important to remember that, as an academic module, you should select a topic which is not personally challenging or triggering. If you are in doubt about what is achievable for you personally, your tutor may be able to help you identify an appropriate topic if the above suggestions are challenging in some way.
Command words
This TMA asks you to make a presentation. This means creating a series of visual slides to communicate information to an audience. The maximum word limit for this is 1200 words (as measured by PowerPoint but it does not include the reference list – please note that in-text references do count). You should focus more on thinking about what an appropriate amount of information and number of slides would be for a 15-minute (8–14-slide) presentation, excluding reference list slide(s). See Week 13, Section 6, Activity 7, ‘Producing effective presentations’ for more on this, and on the appropriate number and type of slides to present the information.
Please note that the TMA task is to produce a set of slides on PowerPoint.
You should not record your presentation or add notes that you would use to present it to an audience. You should not add sound (e.g. commentary) and the presentation should not be automated. We’re just looking for the slides.
There is no need to add animations unless you want to do that. You should include visual content such as Google Images, graphs, charts and smart art, which are relevant to the slides’ content in order to make your slides visually appealing. There is no need to reference where these images come from for this TMA, although you should provide references for copyrighted images if you were ever publishing a presentation in the public domain.
In the presentation you will need to cover the relevant information you learned in Block 3 of the module materials. You should also draw on any other relevant materials from across the module, as well as other relevant material that you have located in your independent study time.
In-text references should be included on the slides (in brackets as usual for TMAs). A list of full references should be included on the final slide of the presentation in a readable manner.
Tips for writing
In this TMA it is important that you don’t present information from any popular sources (such as non-academic websites or TV programmes) as fact. Rather, you need to make sure you can reference academic materials from the module website, the module textbooks, and the Open University Library.
It might be useful to look at the feedback you have received on other essays (from this and previous modules).
Your TMA cannot achieve a pass if it is not in a slide presentation format.
Please note: If you are using software other than PowerPoint to create your slides, please save your file in .ppt, .pptx or .pdf format before submission.
Relevant material
Whichever topic you choose for the TMA, in your presentation you will want to cover the key points you think the mental health professionals need to know to inform their work in the area. At Level 3, you have a higher degree of autonomy about how you structure your presentation. Whichever topic you choose for the TMA, you will want to cover key points, which may include:
- The implications for mental health, how these may be addressed and any relevant legal issues.
- The treatment of individuals both in therapy and by the legal system.
- The importance of listening to group members themselves in psychological research and media representations.
- How the treatment of relevant groups could be improved in counselling and forensic contexts.
- Any contested areas, or areas of dilemma and debate in this area. This will help you to demonstrate criticality.
It is up to you how you structure your presentation.
The resources you might draw on for this TMA are listed on the following pages, but this should not be taken as a suggestion for how to organise your answer. It would also be appropriate to draw on additional material beyond that contained within the module website and textbooks; in particular, relevant research that you have accessed using the Open University Library.
The examples provided above are not intended to provide an exhaustive list but simply provide an opportunity for you to consider some ways that you could successfully approach each question.
Week 13
Whichever topic you choose, you will find it helpful to review Week 13, Section 6, Activity 7, ‘Producing effective presentations’. This activity should have helped you to learn how to present psychological material in PowerPoint – or similar – presentation software. Some of the specific suggestions made here will be useful for this TMA because it takes you through how to prepare for this assessment.
Power dynamics at play when considering the issue of sexual consent.
If you choose to focus on power dynamics and sexual consent, you will need to draw on the material from several weeks, including 12 (how consent can change depending on power imbalances), 13 (power dynamics in therapy), and 15 (consent, sex work, ethical issues in research and agency). The following topics will be particularly useful:
Week 12, Section 5 ‘Encouraging sexual consent’
Week 13, Section 3 ‘Power dynamics in therapy’
Week 15, Section 3 ‘Sex worker voices and ethical research’
Week 15, Section 5 ‘Structure and agency’
Chapter 10 ‘Sex in the therapy room’ from Mad or Bad: A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, which also covers these issues and goes into more depth about what psychology can tell us about power dynamics and therapy.
Chapter 11 ‘Paraphilias’ and Chapter 12 ‘Sex work and sexual exploitation’ also have relevant information on power dynamics and consent. For this topic you will need to evaluate how power dynamics influence a number of human interactions, from conducting research into sex work and sexual consent.
Normativity related to sex and sexuality.
If you choose to focus on normativity in sex and sexuality, you will need to draw on the content material from Weeks 13 and 14. Particularly useful will be:
Week 13, Section 5 ‘LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy’.
Week 14, Sections 3 ‘Criminalisation and pathologisation of LGBTQ+ people’ and 3.1 ‘Focus on the BTQ in LGBTQ+’, which deal with the criminalisation and pathologisation of LGBTQ+ people.
Week 14, Section 5 ‘Should the “paraphilias” be in the DSM-5?’
Chapter 11 ‘Paraphilias’, pages 157–171 from Mad or Bad? A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, which deals with evolving perspectives on homosexuality.
Chapter 10 includes some material on working therapeutically with gender and sexual diversity. For this topic, you will need to evaluate ‘normativity’, and how it has been used to pathologise and criminalise certain groups in history. Furthermore, you will need to discuss the legacy of what is considered normal and abnormal in relation to sex and sexuality.
General feedback for both topics
Feel free also to draw upon material from anywhere else in the module and/or block that is relevant to your answer. For example, you might well find some of the material from Block 1 to be relevant in terms of diagnosis (Week 5 ‘Diagnosis and categorisation’) or media representations (Week 4 ‘Media representations of crime and therapy’).
Guidance on creating your slides
Your slides are the visual material that will accompany your presentation. You should create these in Microsoft PowerPoint. Your presentation should be 8–14 slides long, excluding the references slide.
The slides should comprise the following:
One title slide: Include the title of the presentation and your identification number.
One overview of presentation slide: Detail what the presentation will cover.
Content slides: Include 6–12 content slides.
One references slide: Additional to the 8–14 slides listed above; this should include all of your references.
In order to achieve a higher grade, attention to style and design is needed to bring your slides to life, so you should not submit completely plain slides. Remember that the visuals should always complement the points you have included on your slides. Creating clear points in both visual and teaching terms should be the primary aim. You should not include video material or animations.
The purpose of using a tool like PowerPoint is to help structure your presentation for your audience and enhance the points you are making. To be most effective, your slides should carry key points or messages, but not detail and comment. Do not be tempted to fill up your slides with lots of text and multiple images. This can be overwhelming for the audience.
Text on your slides
Think carefully about the text that you include in your slides. This should be minimal and help to guide the audience through the presentation. Keep the font large; it should not be smaller than 16pt. Use bullet points and avoid full sentences. It can be good to play around with the colour of your background and text, but make sure these do not make the text difficult to read.
If you wish to reference a source of content, you must include an in-text citation on the slide where this content is being used. The references slide at the end of the presentation should provide references that correspond with all in-text citations.
Images on your slides
You are encouraged to include images in your presentation, but not video content or animations. Think about whether your images are appropriate for the audience and context, and whether they add to the key points on the slide. In a professional scenario such as this one, you should try to avoid images that are distressing or dramatic. Also consider how the images you use portray people you are presenting on, and if they perpetuate any negative stereotypes.
When you include images, make sure they are correctly formatted. It is better to use fewer images sparingly rather than too many, which might clash and make your slides harder to decipher.
Note that in this TMA there is no need to reference where your images come from.
Checking your word count on PowerPoint:
There will be only one method for counting words accepted by your tutor. PowerPoint has a word count function, as outlined below (also found at ‘Finding the word count of your presentation’):
To count the words in your slides within a PowerPoint presentation, go to the ‘File’ tab and click ‘Info’.
At the bottom of the rightmost pane, click ‘Show All Properties’.
the ‘Words’ property counts the words.
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