Designing Higher Education: Lessons for Law SchoolsAnette Alén
This literature review presents research published between 2018 and July 2023 relating to design thinking in higher education. It provides an overview of research themes and findings, while also having a particular interest in law education. The findings suggests that design thinking has been discussed across disciplines, including in the context of law education. Overall, design thinking is approached as a beneficial pedagogical method, while exploring its integration and effects or theoretical foundations in various settings. Based on the review, critical voices are few, including, however, discussion on the neoliberalist undertone linked to design thinking. In the context of law education, learning materials are discussed more often than in other fields included in the review. In integrating design thinking, law schools should draw from its benefits, such as the in-built student perspective and skills-based approach, while not forgetting its limitations
Niamh Howlin; Cliona Kelly
In this paper we argue that a ‘Students as Partners’ approach should be used when designing student support systems. The ‘Students as Partners’ or SaP framework emphasizes respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility between faculty partners and student partners. It involves working collaboratively with student partners and ceding some control over processes and outputs. We demonstrate how a SaP approach worked in practice when redesigning an academic advisory system for Law students. The SaP approach helped to ensure that we identified students’ needs and expectations, as well as the barriers and challenges they faced. It also enhanced communication, respect and mutual understanding between faculty and students. This article also identifies some of the challenges associated with SaP, and reflects on both the positive and negative outcomes experienced by both the faculty partners and the student partners. The positives greatly outweighed the negatives, and we argue that SaP approaches ought to be mainstreamed when designing student support systems.
Marc Johnson; Omar Madhloom
Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to technical rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics.
Siobhan McConnell; Lyndsey Bengtsson; Rachel Dunn
This article examines the benefits and challenges of the policy clinic model of clinical legal education and enhances our understanding of the value of this teaching model. In policy clinics, students undertake policy work, conducting a research project for a client with a specific research need. This article presents the findings of the first detailed empirical study into policy clinics, capturing the perceptions of those supervising and undertaking policy work in the policy clinic at Northumbria University Law School. We found that policy work provided clear pedagogical benefits to students as they saw development of both their skills and their employability. Notably, there was a transformative shift for many students from an initial individualistic motivation for what policy work would bring to them personally, to an acknowledgment of the impact of their work on the wider community. Supervisors also benefited from policy work because it enhanced their skills and facilitated their research interests. However, there were challenges with this teaching model, including workload issues, fitting research projects into the academic year and ensuring true student-supervisor collaboration existed within a research project. The study will be of interest to academics undertaking, or intending to undertake, policy work both in Europe and beyond.
Jack Wright Nelson
Legal education will be one of the primary areas affected by the advent of large language models (“LLMs”). And both law students and law teachers will feel the inevitable attraction of LLMs. Got an essay on negligence due tomorrow? No problem – get ChatGPT to draft a general outline, add in some case references, and voilà – an essay. Similarly, during a busy marking season, teachers may be tempted to ask an LLM to review student essays and then allocate marks based on those reviews. The responses to inappropriate LLM usage will vary across law schools. Some will undoubtedly stick their collective heads in the sand by banning ChatGPT. They may even be tempted to revert to handwritten examinations, mooting, and in-class essays as the only assessment forms. I argue that such responses are misguided. After all, the challenge presented by LLMs is a challenge that other faculties have faced before – most notably, the mathematics department with the invention of the calculator. Could LLMs have the same positive impact on legal education that calculators have had on mathematics education? I argue that they can, but that learners must be guided toward appropriate rather than inappropriate LLM usage. How can legal education learners be guided toward appropriate rather than inappropriate LLM usage? I posit that the most effective method to guide learners toward appropriate usage is to make legal education such a joyful, meaningful, and engaging enterprise that learners will want to do it themselves – rather than let computers have all the fun.
Emanuel van Dongen
By using virtual-reality-based technology, Dutch law students train their pleading skills in a virtual courtroom. While watching each other’s performance, students give each other feedback by means of a specially designed feedback app. Afterwards, they can download the feedback and a recording of their performance. This creates an opportunity to practise their pleading skills and to improve their performance in the courtroom. We studied whether elevated levels of heart rate and electrodermal activity are found in connection with the virtual-reality-based exercises, which could indicate arousal and that proved to be the case, denoting the authenticity of the simulation. We also studied whether or not these virtual-reality-based exercises (positively) influence student experience and student learning by focusing on four mechanisms related to the virtual reality exercises: its value/usefulness, competence perceived by students, students’ confidence, and ultimately the role of peer feedback and students’ reflective thinking. Significant increases in heart rate and electrodermal activity occurred from rest into pleading. The construct reflective thinking appeared to be correlated with feedback, value and self-confidence. The virtual-reality-based exercises, as an authentic task, seem to create the opportunity, impossible in real settings, to provide extra training in an authentic environment and to make feedback possible. It remains crucial to learn from feedback and to work on self-determined learning goals.