Earlier today I was reading through a paper by Jenkins, Healey and Zetter on the HEA website entitled “Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments” (published in April 2007). I was struck and somewhat depressed by the fact that none of the examples they cited were of developments in UK law schools. Of course I can’t say for sure why that was (I haven’t asked them for one thing), but when I also tried to track down examples of research-based teaching on the UKCLE website, I found remarkably little there either. Of course, the good news might be that everyone in law schools has sussed out the teaching-research nexus, and its so second nature now that nobody bothers to talk about it. But somehow I don’t think so.
Before going any further with this potential rant, I ought to clarify an earlier distinction that Alan Jenkins and Mick Healey made between research-led and research-based teaching, because I think it is fairly crucial. Research-led teaching, putting it crudely, reflects the student-as-audience paradigm of teaching, where they sit back and admire our erudition as we introduce them to our latest piece of cutting-edge research. Research-based teaching, on the other hand is a form of inquiry-based learning which treats the student as a (joint) participant in the research (and hence the learning) process. My betting is that, beyond the still fairly ubiquitous and highly variable experience of writing a final year dissertation, most law undergraduates experience at least some research-led teaching but very little genuinely research-based learning.
If that’s so, then I suggest we are missing a real opportunity and perpetuating a form of what (adapting Ivan Illych’s notion of disabling professions) I am inclined to call disabling education – an education that actively disempowers our students. It manifests itself in the attitude that we can’t or shouldn’t expect too much originality or creativity of poor little undergraduates. A variation of the same attitude seems to emerge with monotonous regularity in discussions about clinical legal education, when non-participants express doubts/shock/total horror at the idea of undergraduates actually being allowed to give legal advice to real people.
For us as academics to keep students at arms length from the experience of research seems to involve
(a) an impressive example of discrepant reasoning – speaking personally it was precisely the experience of doing a research project and being encouraged to write as an undergraduate that led me to start thinking about academia as a career, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that, or
(b) pure humbug – do we really think that the skills we have developed as researchers are so advanced and so specialised that they are wholly beyond the ken of our students?
and, from the point of view of the future of the academic profession, it is surely about as smart a survival strategy as being in the front row of the charge of the Light Brigade.
I do know that there are some examples of research-based learning happening in our law schools, and I’d love to hear from other colleagues who are doing this sort of work. I know that the people leading these courses find them engaging, motivating and exciting for themselves and their students, and that developing the research-teaching nexus has direct benefits for their own research, as well as for their students’ learning. In a recent e-mail exchange, Ben Pontin, who has been doing some very interesting research-based work with his Environmental Law module at UWE Bristol, observed “Students are brilliant at gathering 'raw material' - trawling historical archives (newpapers, official records, family histories) for snippets of information; detective work. Also, there was a geography dimension to the research, and students enjoyed designing field trips to the sites of leading nuisance actions, to identify whether any trace of what claimants were seeking to protect remains today. However, where students needed input from an academic was in interpreting the significance of empirical findings. Great at treating law as a material object (a field or stately home protected against a polluting factory or sewage works), students struggled with law's ideas!” I think that last observation makes for a particularly interesting insight and suggests a useful point around which we could reconstruct the role of the teacher in a more research-based legal education process.
Showing posts with label law teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law teaching. Show all posts
Monday, 1 October 2007
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
IP and communities of practice
I spent a long but interesting day yesterday in Birmingham with a group of Intellectual Property teachers (OK, that may not be your notion of interesting, but, please, suspend your disbelief for a moment, not least because they were a nice group of people....)
The event was the inaugural workshop of the European Intellectual Property Teachers' Network, an informal grouping that has grown out of an equally informal UK-based group that has met fairly regularly over the last six or seven years. The event itself was pretty packed, with two keynotes (from Steve Rowan, Director of Intellectual Property Policy at the UK Intellectual Property Office, and Marielle Piana from the European Patent Academy of the EPO) and four panel sessions. The spread of subject matter was also quite broad, with much discussion of appropriate content, design and delivery: the place of history, generalist vs specialist modules, problem-based learning, virtual delivery, and so on. Interdisciplinarity was a strong theme (music to my socio-legal ears!), recognising the extent to which an understanding of IP policy and practice benefits from, perhaps even necessitates, a strongly interdisciplinary approach. The need to teach IP management skills and issues also emerged from a couple of presentations, including an impressive example from the Technical University of Munich of the way in which student motivation and learning could be stimulated by a deep, problem-based, approach to learning using case studies based on real high-tech companies.
In a way what was most exciting for me was not so much the content (I'm not an IP lawyer) but that the event happened at all, and that it brought together people teaching aspects of IP from different countries, different disciplinary backgrounds, and for different purposes. In my experience its quite unusual to find a group of HE people from across a field of study like this meeting to talk about teaching and learning. There was certainly a sense of interest and engagement in the debates and a willingness to sharing ideas, and I have little doubt that the shared IP context enhanced the feeling of participation in a common enterprise. Full credit to Claire Howell (Aston Business School) and Duncan Matthews (Queen Mary, University of London) for pulling it all together.
The event has got me thinking rather more concretely about something that I've come across increasingly frequently lately - the idea of communities of practice (CoP). The term itself seems to have been coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and used extensively in their book Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991). (In a later book -Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998 - Wenger goes on to explore the notion of a CoP in much greater depth.)
Lave and Wenger's work starts from the supposition that all learning is social and comes primarily from our experience of participating in daily life as a series of engagements with others in joint enterprises. From this perspective, at its simplest, a community of practice is a group of individuals participating in shared activity which is characterised by collective or collaborative learning. This process of “mutual engagement” in fact comes to define both the practice and the community itself. Communities thus develop over time around things that matter to the people involved. They develop a 'shared repertoire' of communal resources and symbols that carry the accumulated knowledge and experience of the group. Rather instrumentally, they interest me because they sound like potentially powerful mechanisms for sharing knowledge, solving problems and innovating.
I'm not sure that I know enough about CoPs yet to differentiate this concept from a lot of other work on organisational learning, but Wenger's sensitivity to social complexity and what seems to be a strongly constructionist view of the world are, for me, intuitively appealing and I think the label itself is quite powerful. At UKCLE we are very much focussed on supporting the needs of our subject community. While I think that's an important focus and a useful shorthand for us, not least to remind us where our primary responsibility lies, it is descriptively and developmentally rather a blunt notion. Even within law as a single discipline there is a multiplicity of more or less well defined 'communities' and interests which overlay what I suspect may still be a pretty individualistic sense of what it is to be a 'law teacher'. Could CoPs be a useful way of not just thinking ('sociologically') about how sub-disciplinary cultures evolve, but a means of actually constructing and developing sub-disciplinary interests and activities? (The Society of Legal Scholars' Subject Sections in the UK - broadly akin to AALS Sections in the US - perhaps perform some of that function already, but probably not all of it). Indeed, can you construct a CoP or is it more an emergent property of a field or organisation? What features appear to sustain and grow a CoP? One of the questions at the end of yesterday's event, not surprisingly was, "what next", and the CoP literature might generate some interesting ideas. I'll try and write some more about this when I have more time, and have been able to do some more spadework!
The event was the inaugural workshop of the European Intellectual Property Teachers' Network, an informal grouping that has grown out of an equally informal UK-based group that has met fairly regularly over the last six or seven years. The event itself was pretty packed, with two keynotes (from Steve Rowan, Director of Intellectual Property Policy at the UK Intellectual Property Office, and Marielle Piana from the European Patent Academy of the EPO) and four panel sessions. The spread of subject matter was also quite broad, with much discussion of appropriate content, design and delivery: the place of history, generalist vs specialist modules, problem-based learning, virtual delivery, and so on. Interdisciplinarity was a strong theme (music to my socio-legal ears!), recognising the extent to which an understanding of IP policy and practice benefits from, perhaps even necessitates, a strongly interdisciplinary approach. The need to teach IP management skills and issues also emerged from a couple of presentations, including an impressive example from the Technical University of Munich of the way in which student motivation and learning could be stimulated by a deep, problem-based, approach to learning using case studies based on real high-tech companies.
In a way what was most exciting for me was not so much the content (I'm not an IP lawyer) but that the event happened at all, and that it brought together people teaching aspects of IP from different countries, different disciplinary backgrounds, and for different purposes. In my experience its quite unusual to find a group of HE people from across a field of study like this meeting to talk about teaching and learning. There was certainly a sense of interest and engagement in the debates and a willingness to sharing ideas, and I have little doubt that the shared IP context enhanced the feeling of participation in a common enterprise. Full credit to Claire Howell (Aston Business School) and Duncan Matthews (Queen Mary, University of London) for pulling it all together.
The event has got me thinking rather more concretely about something that I've come across increasingly frequently lately - the idea of communities of practice (CoP). The term itself seems to have been coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and used extensively in their book Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991). (In a later book -Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998 - Wenger goes on to explore the notion of a CoP in much greater depth.)
Lave and Wenger's work starts from the supposition that all learning is social and comes primarily from our experience of participating in daily life as a series of engagements with others in joint enterprises. From this perspective, at its simplest, a community of practice is a group of individuals participating in shared activity which is characterised by collective or collaborative learning. This process of “mutual engagement” in fact comes to define both the practice and the community itself. Communities thus develop over time around things that matter to the people involved. They develop a 'shared repertoire' of communal resources and symbols that carry the accumulated knowledge and experience of the group. Rather instrumentally, they interest me because they sound like potentially powerful mechanisms for sharing knowledge, solving problems and innovating.
I'm not sure that I know enough about CoPs yet to differentiate this concept from a lot of other work on organisational learning, but Wenger's sensitivity to social complexity and what seems to be a strongly constructionist view of the world are, for me, intuitively appealing and I think the label itself is quite powerful. At UKCLE we are very much focussed on supporting the needs of our subject community. While I think that's an important focus and a useful shorthand for us, not least to remind us where our primary responsibility lies, it is descriptively and developmentally rather a blunt notion. Even within law as a single discipline there is a multiplicity of more or less well defined 'communities' and interests which overlay what I suspect may still be a pretty individualistic sense of what it is to be a 'law teacher'. Could CoPs be a useful way of not just thinking ('sociologically') about how sub-disciplinary cultures evolve, but a means of actually constructing and developing sub-disciplinary interests and activities? (The Society of Legal Scholars' Subject Sections in the UK - broadly akin to AALS Sections in the US - perhaps perform some of that function already, but probably not all of it). Indeed, can you construct a CoP or is it more an emergent property of a field or organisation? What features appear to sustain and grow a CoP? One of the questions at the end of yesterday's event, not surprisingly was, "what next", and the CoP literature might generate some interesting ideas. I'll try and write some more about this when I have more time, and have been able to do some more spadework!
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