99 Days of Something – #3 or Society of Legal Scholars Day 1
There was no writing as such do be done today so again the blog is the only writing in my string of writing I am going to do today. Together with the brilliant Dr Kat Langley I convene the Legal Education Subject Section at the Society of Legal Scholars. We had two really good sessions today so here are some of my initial very brief reflections on the contributions.
We started the conference with a brilliant panel of Nick Cartwright, Rita D’Alton-Harrison and Simisayo Olawore on Studying Black in Law School: The intersections of Black Student Life. There was so much in that panel presentation that I am not sure where to start really. We have so much to unpack, think about, challenge if we genuinely want to create inclusive legal education. Hearing from Simisayo about her lived experience as a black female student highlighted really clearly that even when we are trying to be inclusive, our efforts might not be landing how we intend them to. I was thinking about how we get round this issue that presents itself whenever we as experts in a particular field or as educators think that we know what is best or how we can get ideas across. We will always get caught up in the power dynamics of teacher/student that risk silencing some voices, re-enforcing stereotypes or misrepresenting experiences – even with the best of intentions. I think if we genuinely want to tackle this we need to relinquish much more power in the classroom. We need to genuinely listen, co-create, tear down and rebuild our discipline in a way which treats all of our experiences of law as valid and useful starting points for analysis.
In our second session we shifted focus and started with a paper which made me think about how we can use visuals to help us understand and explain complex legal concepts by Tristan Webb. It prompted me to think about how I make sense of complexity. I don’t think I really do visuals. Everything I do is text based in some way. So even my diagrams are text based – more mind map or flow chart than picture. I think in words not in pictures. But that is not helpful for anyone who thinks in pictures rather than in words. So how can I adapt some of my teaching, representations, slides and other materials to help students develop the things, whether its diagrams, pictures, memes, cartoons, objects, whatever it is to help them make sense of the things we are talking about. And seamlessly that linked me to the next presentation about using Lego to help students grapple with contract law doctrine and develop a more nuanced understanding. Marton Ribary and Antony Starza-Allen outlined how they used Lego and a structured series of builds to really get students thinking about the complexities of contract law.
Questions that came up on both of those papers were around how we measure success. How do we know if these things have a tangible impact on student performance. I don’t know the answer to that but I wondered whether we should maybe just stop obsessing about measuring. I wondered if we could just celebrate the fact that students maybe just had fun, that the noise levels in the classroom rose that little bit, that there was more conversation, more laughter, maybe even giggles. Can we just accept that it doesn’t matter if students on average did X% better if they did the thing or used the gimmick or whatever, maybe the increase in the grade is irrelevant. What if what matters is simply that they enjoyed the learning, that they talked to others, collaborated and had fun.
The final paper was a presentation by Dawn Watkins on a game about law for school children and I have more to say on that and no capacity now. It’s time for bed to let me brain do its thing on all of this – more tomorrow
99 Days of Something – #2
Well, 99 days of writing? Yeah. About that. I haven’t written a thing today. I intended to this morning but then I got sidetracked and caught up in emails and admin stuff. Not opening my email first thing is obviously a lesson I need to learn over and over again. And then I forgot about writing. I nearly failed on day 1 of actually trying to string together consecutive days of writing and day 2 of blogging about it.
I went to yoga this evening and as I settled into the mat and focused on just breathing, just being and trying to let go of any judgment or expectation my brain obviously did its thing in the background. As we finished the practice and the teacher asked us to think about what we could do to bring ourselves into balance this evening, I thought about writing and how writing has always brought balance to me. I started keeping a journal from as soon as I could hold a pen and make some vaguely recognisable marks on paper. I wrote stories, I wrote letters to friends all over the world, I dabbled in awful teenage angsty poetry and crafted stories. I wrote almost as much as I read and I devoured books. I still journal in burst but rarely consistently, I have recently started letting my brain do it’s random thing by playing with fiction writing – it’s not for anyone to ever read, I have no plans to turn the snippets of stories into anything coherent – it is just an outlet for the randomness that builds up in my brain.
Writing then for me has never been about productivity. Writing is balance. Writing brings balance. Writing is both a joy in itself and something that can help pull me out of dark places and towards joy. So often now writing feels pressured, it is tied to deadlines and adheres to the confines of academic expectations and norms. And there is some joy in that sort of writing too. I somehow like the challenge and discipline of writing for academic journals, of having to craft an argument in a particular way using appropriate evidence and following academic conventions. Being able to do that is somehow satisfying. But it can also be constraining and I think I am learning that to balance that sort of writing, I also need other sorts of writing. I need to allow space to just play with words, be more fun, more decadent and more outrageous. Writing is not one thing. Sometimes it is just silly, sometimes it is serious and following rules, sometimes it is deeply personal and just mine and often it just is.
So today’s writing is just this blog post, just some thoughts about balance, nothing meaningful, nothing serious, no rules but also no silliness. Maybe just a reminder to us all to think about what brings us into balance. I hadn’t thought about writing in this way before but I think writing is the thing that helps me balance everything else.
99 Days of Something – #1
Last year I managed a 100 day series of blog posts starting with this one below. 100 Days of Wonder was inspired by having booked tickets to a 100 Years of Wonder Disney on Ice and being 100 days out from our Disney trip. I also had Covid so wasn’t up to doing much and spent a lot of time in my head, watching TV and scrolling through photos. You can read the whole – rather random series by going back through the posts if you wish. I did that yesterday because I wondered about doing something similar again. Yesterday was our 100 days out from our next Disney trip day. This time Disney Paris. I realised I missed the discipline of taking time to reflect and write every day… and then I didn’t actually write anything yesterday.
So, here I am wondering whether it is worth trying again to string a series of blog posts together in a similar way. 99 Days of the discipline of writing, even just a little bit, every day might help keep me focused and might actually help me make progress with some writing projects. What do you need to write well? I have never been one for sitting at a desk. I always had a desk, I rarely sat at one. I am more of a notebook on the sofa, typing away in a coffee shop or lounging somewhere random kind of a girl for writing. But I do spend a lot of time at my desk at home so today I put up some things to make me smile. On the left I framed the packaging from the 3 Disney Coffee bean varieties we bought on our last trip. On the right are 3 postcards I bought in Philadelphia in May. So yeah, my writing and creativity is usually fuelled by Disney, Coffee and the inspirational words of others. Let’s see how this works for the next 99 days.
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