Law in Action: integrating social justice issues into the curriculum using clinical legal education
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Slides for the presentation by Rosie Harding (Keele University) at LILAC10.
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Law in Action: integrating social justice issues into the curriculum using clinical legal education
- 1. Law in Action: Integrating social justice issues into the curriculum using clinical legal education Rosie Harding & Andrew Francis Keele University Contact Email: r.harding@law.keele.ac.uk
- 2. Level 2, elective, clinical module (15 credits) Open to all law students Module aims & objectives: To introduce students to how law works in the community and facilitate and empower students to take and active and reflective role in their learning. To provide a realistic context in which students can practice their general transferable and applied communication skills. To provide local community organisations with useful input on legal topics. What is ‘Law in Action’
- 3. A combination of: ‘Clinical’ Legal Education – educating students to become good lawyers Community Legal Education – educating the public about their rights and responsibilities Streetlaw/Legal Literacy – a form of community legal education Based on principles of: ‘learning-by-doing’ Reflective learning Self- and peer- assessment What is ‘Law in Action’
- 4. Kennedy (1998: 58): “A lot of what happens is the inculcation, through a formal curriculum and the classroom experience of a set of political attitudes towards the economy and society in general, toward the law and the possibilities of life in general” Kennedy (1998: 61): “there are peripheral subjects like legal philosophy....clinical legal education... not truly relevant to the core of law... a kind of playground” The Ideological Content of Legal Education
- 5. ‘technocratic trade education’: Thornton (2005: 267) Masculine domain: (Thornton, 1996); Collier (1998); Sommerlad and Sanderson (1998) Corporate Law Orientation: “large corporate law firms ... week after week, visibly manifest the meaning of law and the exercise of power .... As [one student] observed, ..., ‘even the idea of alternative careers is a strange idea.” (Manderson and Turner (2006: 665). See also Sherr and Webb (1989); Granfield and Koenig (1992); Rolfe and Anderson (2003) Instrumental motivations for choosing Law: Pitcher and Purcell (1998) Ideological Content of Legal Education
- 7. Assessment and Student Engagement. See e.g. Sambell and McDowell (1998)
- 8. Learning by Experience: See Kolb’s work, which describes learning as ‘the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.’ (1984: 38, cited by Light and Cox, 2001: 52)
- 9. “that the teaching of appropriate and defined skills is undertaken in a way which combines practical knowledge with theoretical understanding” ACLEC (1996: para2.2) NB: Hall and Kerrigan (2010) propose deeper embedding of clinical approaches in the mainstream curriculum given its perceived advantages in developing students skills and substantive understanding.Skills and Engagement
- 11. UK Context: Mapping best practice in clinical legal education Grimes and Brayne (2004): in-house advice centres and/or representation services; outreach clinics (advice and/or representation); community based consultancy services; placements; legal literacy clinics (Streetlaw); simulation clinics
- 12. Nicolson (2006) criticises the importance placed on ‘skills development’ in UK clinical education, suggesting that ‘educationally oriented’ clinics undermine social justice aims and may be ethically problematic in prioritising student rather than the community’s needs.Clinical Legal Education
- 14. Introduction to variety of social justice topics
- 17. Presentation on research/Citizenship class
- 19. Brighter Futures (homelessness charity)
- 20. Savanah (Stoke rape crisis centre)
- 21. Stoke CAB (immigration and asylum team)
- 22. Madeley High School (citizenship curriculum)
- 23. Assessment:
- 24. 1) Peer Assessment of Practice Presentation
- 25. 2) Portfolio: Reflective Log (1,500 words) + Essay (2,500 words)Teaching Social Justice through CLE
- 26. Paper evaluation form (quantitative) Completed during class time Anonymous limited Online evaluation (qualitative) Anonymous In-depth Reflective logs Compulsory Assessed (anonymous) Module Evaluation
- 30. “refreshing to actually get involved instead of classroom learning all the time”
- 31. “I have found this module really interesting and worthwhile”
- 32. “I really do mean the above. This has been my favourite module”
- 33. “a different course content which provides a break from the norm”Paper Evaluation Form
- 34. “This was the most interesting module in law so far. More modules should encourage going out into the community to literally put ‘law in action’ – it really helped me learn more about law and how it applies to us every day. If only other modules were as interesting as this one!” Interesting?
- 37. “[the presentation] isn’t marked. It was atrocious all wasted effort went into something unmarked. This meant time was being given to it when it could have been going towards something/another subject thats actually graded. Awful aspect. Worst part of the course.”‘Negative’ Feedback
- 39. “trying to organise the people in our group”
- 40. “trying to write my final reflective log”
- 42. “Presentation. My group was not motivated to do the necessary work as we were this was not being graded. We spend weeks making posters and powerpoints and researching, and then do a 30min presentation that counts nothing towards our final grade. I find that extremely unfair when we could be doing valuable research towards a portfolio that counts 100%; towards our final mark. Granted I learnt a lot on a subject I previously did not care for. But I still did not enjoy being told to work on something that would have no say whatsoever in my final mark, when I worked so hard to make something out of nothing.” The ‘worst’ aspect of the module?
- 44. “meeting up with the people who were using the CAB service and being able to interview them and find out about their situation as this was definately a new experience for me and was a real eye-opener.”
- 45. “going out in to the community to do our own research and also the presentation at the end was the most fun.”
- 46. “the lectures and learning about asylum seekers, asylum law and discrimination etc, but also I found the group work and presentation really enjoyable.”
- 47. “The independently researched essay.” The ‘best’ aspect of the module?
- 48. Challenging assumptions (see also Nicolson: 2006: 9) “Having had the ability to interview a number of asylum seekers I was able to appreciate fully the extent to which the current legal system regarding refugee law is failing those relying on it. The evidence we obtained, coupled with the research I did on the standards expected for such accommodation revealed how far the Law falls shorts [sic] of providing what it sets out to achieve” (070092255028) Reflective Logs
- 49. Assumptions challenged (but not always through the Presentation) “I had never thought about it before. All I remember was negativity about asylum seekers through the media which is probably why I held the opinion that there may have been a sense of illegality surrounding them. However I was really shocked when I found out that only 26% of applications were admitted in 2007... This week probably had the biggest impact on me... I had never really taken the perspective of using the Law up until this point” (07010527012) Reflective Logs
- 50. Excitement and possibilities of alternative legal practice: “It was exciting it was out of the lecture...Before the interviews started, I was really excited as I felt like a professional and it was during the interview in which I felt like our research really had a practice” (07013935) I feel that my conceptualisation of my legal studies and my ambition beyond is something that has been hindered by too much attention to the financial incentives that the profession offers and not influenced enough by the difference that community involvement and pro bono work can accomplish in deprived communities.(090507165) Reflective Logs
- 54. Integrates key transferable skills into the LLB curriculum:
- 55. Team working
- 56. Research Skills
- 59. Encourages Law Students to think about alternatives to traditional legal practiceLaw in Action:
Editor's Notes
- Nicolson cites the Sheffield Hallam Clinical Handbook which makes clear “it is primarily about helping you understand the Law”. At the very least, Nicolson, suggests this misses the progressive potential of clinics – of more concern he suggests – this is ethically problematic given the poverty and marginalisation of the communities who rely on clinic advice and services.
- Lectures: see handout for an overview of the lectures for the module – these map on to the interests of the community partners involved in the module. All students therefore get an introduction to the areas of work covered by each of the community partners.Peer Assessment: Skills associated with evaluating others are ones that students would like to and should acquire through the HE process (Boud and Falchikov, 1989). For this reason alone peer-assessment should be taken seriously in HE. As Wheater, Langan and Dunleavy (2005: 1) note “peer-assessment can be viewed in many ways: from a tool for reflection by students to a method for reducing staff marking loads.” These authors claim that there are increasing pedagogic arguments for using peer-assessment in HE. Moreover, Phil Race (1999) points out that portfolios, essay plans, presentations, reports, annotated bibliographies, practical work and poster displays all lend themselves well to peer-assessment. The question whether ‘novices’ are competent to assess others is a live issue in peer-assessment (Wheater et al, 2005). Particular ‘grudges’ or particular friendship alliances which would colour the marks peers would give to one another is also a concern in peer-assessment. Some ways of resolving this issue are for staff to moderate peer-assessed work; and/or for the peer-assessed component of a task/module to be small; and/or for peer-assessment to occur in verbal form during which a staff member is present and sees the presentation or poster presentation. One key positive to be gained from peer-assessment is that through the processes of evaluating a peer’s work (for instance an essay) the student may gain insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their own work and the marking criteria, which in turn demystifies assessment. Careful discussion before initiating this type of peer-assessment is necessary, as is the provision of very detailed assessment criteria to students. Being in possession of, and actively using, assessment criteria is beneficial to peer-assessors because this facilitates active engagement in the marking processes. For the recipient of peer-assessment the feedback provided may be especially intelligible because it comes from a colleague. Indeed peer assessment does embody (in its idealised form) principles of reciprocity and equity which may provide a useful module for engagement with others in the future, both inside and outside the university context. According to Race (1999) and Wheater et al (2005) it is crucial for the success and smooth running of peer-assessment is that it is well managed by staff. When this is the case, I believe that peer-assessment can be a very valuable form of assessment, and a positive enhancement of the student learning experience. Peer assessment should certainly not be dismissed as lacking reliability or validity, though placing too much emphasis on peer-assessment may lead students to question marks awarded by academic staff, and therefore it should be used in conjunction with other assessment techniques, or as a formative exercise (Race et al 2005).A common criticism of peer assessment is that subjectivity in marking leads to a lack of reliability and validity – but this sort of criticism is far from limited to peer assessment and can be levelled at marking practices of most academics and most assessment types (see e.g., Attwood, 2008)The main trouble is, however, that students don’t like it very much! More on that in a moment…Reflective practice has been integrated into the assessment for Law in Action through the reflective log portion of the portfolio. Donald Schön’s book, ‘The Reflective Practitioner’ (1983) is seen as a classic text in this area of educational theory. Schön suggested that there were two main forms of reflection used by professionals ‘reflection-in-action’ and ‘reflection-on-action’. The former occurs during an action that does not proceed according to plan, the latter is retrospective reflection after an action has finished. Commentators have seen reflective practice very much as a cyclical activity with experience feeding into or provoking reflection, the results of which feedback into subsequent practice/experience. Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle is probably the most influential model of this learning process with concrete experience leading to reflection leading to abstract conceptualizing leading to active experimentation which leads back to concrete experience (see Moon, 1999). Various different ways of structuring self-review have been suggested in order to learn the most possible from reviewing practice, including ‘critical incident logs’ (see Moon, 1999), but being actively engaged in review practice (Brockbank et al, 2002) is key. As such, the incorporation of a reflective log into the module is one way of ensuring that students engage in reflective learning on the law in action module.
- Between myself and Andrew, we’ll take you on a whistle-stop tour of what our students thought of this module. Obviously it can be challenging to gain an accurate picture of the student experience of a module, especially through crude evaluation methods like those that are most easily available to us. Students who either have something they really want to praise or something they really want to criticise are those most likely to complete traditional evaluation forms. Because of this, we did quite extensive evaluation of the first year of the module. Overall, this was a valuable exercise, and one which we plan to repeat annually. I’ll go through the Paper evaluations and the online evaluation to give you a flavour of the general responses from students, then I’ll hand over to Andrew to take you through some of the comments from the reflective logs.
- Good rate of return By way of comparison, this year’s core level 1 semester 1 stats were 91/193 students (47%) returnedLots of nice comments – always good to hear these sorts of things from our students….
- This question, the standard ‘is this module interesting’ question, which can be seen as a bit of damp squib of a question is actually driving at some really quite important issues of engagement. Given the topical content of the module is social justice issues – things like discrimination, asylum law, homelessness, access to justice – it’s really refreshing to get feedback like this from students. Intrinsically, getting students to think more carefully about how law works out there in the real world must force them to think more carefully and critically about social justice issues. Perhaps even to make them become less instrumental in their approach to learning…
- Certainly it seems that the students overwhelmingly agreed that they were encouraged to express their own opinions and to think critically about the course material. Here, as you can see 95 % of students agreed that they were encouraged to participate and express their own opinions, whilst 89% agreed that they were encouraged to think critically about the topics. But does that mean that they actually succeeded in moving away from instrumental approaches to learning??
- *sigh*If there was one recurring theme from the student evaluation forms for this module it’s that the students would like the group presentation to ‘count towards the overall mark’Difficult (though not impossible) to operationalise – have decided not to introduce a summatively assessed element to the presentation/group work this year – instead try to make it clearer to students that the more they put into the group work, the more they will get from their experience on the module.“The practice presentation was a mess. Our group benefited greatly from the guidance of the class and the tutor. The presentation at the school bore little resemblance to its ugly cousin practice.” “I think it was really useful because it showed us how much we’d got done and also what we needed to improve on. The peer assessment was very honest and critically effective and useful.”
- Monday of this week passed was the introductory lecture for this year’s law in action course. Building on these comments I spent a good spell setting out why the presentation was not directly assessesed, but rather was indirectly assessed through the reflective log.“The community presentation itself is not assessed. This does NOT mean that it is unimportant, rather it reflects the pro bono and community legal education aims of the Law in Action module. It is essential that the group work is carried out in order to best serve the community partner. The presentation is assessed indirectly through the reflective log portion of the Law in Action Portfolio.”
- None of the students said that the reflective log was the best part of the module…overall they found it a challenging thing to do. Pass over to Andrew to take you through some aspects of the reflective log.
- NB: Not all the logs achieved this level of reflection. A significant number of the logs were very descriptive, simply summarising the content of lectures and content covered in a particular week. There was a lack of understanding about the processes of reflection and contextualisation that the reflective log sought to encourage. Even among some of the better students, there was a failure to make effective links between the presentation, the completion of the log and writing and research of the essay section of the portfolio.Those students working with Madeley High School were less able to recognise the Public Legal Education benefits of their work – they saw greater distance between this and organisations like the CAB who were more obviously doing law work. Future delivery of the module will attempt to make these connections clearer. Those students reflecting on the Madeley tended to focus on the (still valuable) process of developing broader transferable skills in terms of team-working, communications skills and the benefits of peer assessment.