Diversity – why it’s important and why it’s not easy
I am currently writing a paper on gender and the Court of Justice of the EU. In preparation for that paper and as part of my research I spent quite a bit of time reading material about why a more diverse judiciary might be a good thing. This got me thinking about diversity more generally and as usual my thoughts eventually turned to law schools and legal education. The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that diversity in law schools is really important for all sorts of reasons. So firstly what do I mean by diversity and secondly why do I think it is important?
Working at Bradford University Law School gives an interesting but skewed picture of diversity. The University as a whole scores very highly on diversity indicators but the experience in the classroom is very different. Our cohort is not particularly diverse. Most of our students are from an asian background and most live at home very close to campus. So yes, I am including ethnic/racial/religious diversity in my thinking as well as things like gender, sexual orientation, disability etc. However I am also thinking about questions of class, education, background, relationship status and, perhaps importantly position, in relation to the purpose of legal education, differences in aims and ambitions and career goals and reaosn for being at university. I am thinking about both students and academics here.
I, as most of you will know, am a firm believer in a liberal legal education. I don’t care much about the needs of the profession or at least not that they should impact on what we do at degree level. I don’t care whether students want to go into legal practice or do something else. I care about learning for learning’s sake and wanting to learn/know/find out just because… Not so long ago I would probably have argued that we should all take that stance. However, the more I think and read about diversity the more I think I was probably wrong there. Diversity of views is really important and it is crucial that students are exposed to a variety of views. It is part of learning to make up your own mind, to work out which views you find convincing and why and to form your own views which you can justify in a reasoned (if passionate!) way.
So diversity is important because it brings different views, experiences, stances and understandings to the table which will continuously challenge our own and force us to think deeply about why we think what we think and why we do what we do in the way that we do it. It may lead us to change our minds but even where it does not, or perhaps particularly where it does not, it helps us to formualte our point of view more clearly, to engage with critiques and to further the arguments in the ongoing debates about the purpose of legal education as well as substantive areas of law etc. Engaging with different views and experiences is a good thing. It helps us drive knowledge and understanding forward. It also of course is important for students (and academics) to have role models and people they can identify and feel comfortable with.
In a law school such as the one I work with, this is really important because our student cohort is not very diverse. Students come from similar backgrounds with similar aspirations and expectations. They are not really exposed to differing views from their peers so it is important for us to share our thoughts, our perspectives with them to give them alternative visions as to what law degrees can be about, what can be achieved with them and what the future may hold. We need to make them think. I don’t want students to think I’m right. I’d like students to think about why I might be right, or why my vision of legal education might work for them – or indeed why it might not.
And that leads me on to why diversity is hard. Genuine diversity only works if you have people who are genuinely diverse. As academics though some of the things that might have made us diverse have been eroded by the education etc that has brought us to where we are. It might be that as legal academics and law teachers we have more in common than not. Some of us will of course hang on to our identity as LGBTQ or feminists or working class or whatever more strongly than others but even then it is likely to have been influenced by also being a legal academic. Diversity is also difficult because it means we have to engage with what we think and why rather than just taking it for granted and then we have to go one step further and engage with what others think and why. And that engagement has to be genuine. A simple ‘well that’s just rubbish’ won’t do. We all like to be right, we all like to think that our view is the best, the most logical and the most convincing and if only people would listen they would see that. However to really benefit from diversity ourselves and help our students do so we need to accept that we might all be wrong but hopefully will all be right and that we can all learn something from each other – even if that is just to defend our views in a more considered and holistic way.
I am still thinking about this and I am sure there are flaws in my argument here but I thought it was worth posting and if you have any thoughts on this please do share!
Lost in Translation – LLM Approval Meetings
I had a meeting as well as several conversations with colleagues last week about approval of a new course, an LLM to be precise. Throughout these conversations and to some extent the meeting itself, there was a real sense of a ‘them and us’ culture pitching those on the approval team/committee and administrators against the academic team (so in this case mainly me) designing the course. It was a pre meeting to get the paperwork right for the approval event in a month’s time. Apart from arguments about whether the institutions ‘validates’ or ‘approves’ and whether it is ‘Master degree’, ‘Masters degree’ or ‘Master’s degree’, there were elements I found both interesting, frustrating and ultimately a little upsetting. The details of the meeting and issues we discussed are really not important here but at one point I was told in a nice but firm way ‘it isn’t your programme’. And of course the person making that statement is right, it isn’t mine, it’s a university degree course, if it is anybody’s it is the university’s. But as I left the meeting (with issues resolved and everyone sort of happy) I couldn’t shake off that statement and I am beginning to wonder whether it might be at the core of the tension between admin staff particularly staff charged with quality and QAA matters and academics.
Because you know what, that LLM is my programme. Not only have I invested a ridiculous amount of time in creating the paperwork required for it to be approved (not validated!). I have invested far more time thinking about it, designing it, redesigning it, making it coherent, making it flow. But it’s not just time, there is so much of me in that programme. The learning, teaching and assessment (LTA) strategy reflects my LTA philosophy, it reflects my socio-legal background and convictions, it is built on my ethos of education and research. Of course it’s my programme. I’m not a complete nutter, I realise that in due course someone else is likely to take over as director of studies (or programme leader as I think we now call them) and that as we start to teach the programme it will move from being mine to being ours and staff will take ownership of their modules and the programme overall. I know that, but at this stage, it’s very much mine. It has had input from students, other staff, administrators etc but essentially I have put my heart and soul into it (see I can do drama queen quite well!) and it is most definitely mine.
If that is not something that is clearly understood by staff in the Academic Quality Unit (AQU – or whatever equivalent there is at other institutions) and if academics don’t fully appreciate that staff charged with quality assurance issues are likely to see programmes as university programmes without the emotional baggage attached to them then it is no wonder that discussions can get heated, defensive and ultimately get us nowhere. I suspect academics think administrators and AQU staff are stifling creativity and innovation and are caught up in a tick box culture and that administrators think academics are in their own little bubble with little regard for regulation. Neither is probably true, or at least it needn’t be if only we talked to each other in a language both groups understood.
You see when I talk about a module being at Level 7 I am talking about the module itself, the content, the way I see the module delivered and the way I see it fitting into the programme. AQU staff can’t possibly think of it that way – they don’t have the knowledge of the course or the teaching experience to do so – they are thinking about the module descriptor and what that reflects. Asking me to amend the module descriptor so that it better reflects the Level 7 module is one thing, something I will find irritating but will ultimately be ok with. Telling me my module is not at Level 7 is something else entirely, I will get defensive about – I designed it, trust me, it’s at Level 7. There are other examples of academics and administrators using the same language but meaning very different things but I don’t want to bore you, essentially I (and maybe academics generally) am talking about the programme etc and AQU are talking about the paperwork.
As academics we perhaps need to be less precious about ‘our programmes’ but then I didn’t really think I was. I am just as interested in providing documentation which is ultimately going to be for students, which is clear, user friendly and provides the reader with a strong sense of what the programme is about as AQU are. What I am not interested in is ticking boxes for the sake of it. I know my LLM is a good quality programme which will engage students and help them become better researchers, critical thinkers and writers. What I need AQU to do is help me turn my vision into paperwork the institution can understand because, as it turns out, I don’t speak the institution’s language – and I don’t think I want to either.
Horse riding lessons and feedback frustrations
This is not a blog about horses, or riding lessons or anything like that but I do have riding lessons, twice a week when I can fit it in and today’s lesson, though hot and sticky and airless, helped me understand something about some of my students which has until now baffled me a bit: Students who come for feedback on their exams or assignments and say ‘I don’t think I applied the law enough’ or ‘I was too descriptive wasn’t I’. Well if they know that, why didn’t they change it?
So, as I was trotting round the outdoor arena during my horse riding lesson this morning, I was getting increasingly irritated that I just wasn’t quite getting things right – this happens a lot but I’ve never made the connections before (I’ll spare you the technical details, this isn’t about my riding abilities). As I made pretty much the same mistake for the umpteenth time I suddenly recognised that sense of frustration I was feeling. I see it in students all the time when I give feedback. The thing with the riding lesson today was this: I wasn’t trying to do something difficult or complicated, I know what I was meant to be doing and why, I know how to do it and the instructions, guidance and advice given by the instructor made perfect sense. In other words, ‘I get it’ – doesn’t mean I can do it. Sometimes I can feel myself doing it wrong but am too late to correct it, sometimes I don’t realise what has gone wrong until my instructor tells me.
This pattern applies to a lot of the students who have come for feedback on exam performance in particular. They know the law, often they know intricate detail and information about cases that I would have to go look up; they know they need to apply the law to the question they are given, they know why they are doing this and usually also how to do it. Anything I tell them about structuring answers, referring back to the question, imagining what the client in a problem question would want to know, making a point and justifying it with evidence etc, make perfect sense to them – doesn’t mean they can do it.
Some of the students genuinely have no idea where it’s all gone wrong, they know it has but they don’t understand why, when they knew the law, knew they needed to apply it and knew how to do it, they still didn’t manage to do it. Others don’t know where it’s all gone wrong and it isn’t until I show them their work and explain that they have given a far too general answer, haven’t fully answered the question or have provided description without analysis that they see that that is what they have done. As soon as I point it out, they agree it’s obvious.
So what can we do about that? The feedback I am giving these students isn’t really anything they don’t already know. We can talk about what I think went wrong and how to improve and not make the same mistakes again – but they either already know that or it is obvious to them once I’ve pointed out the issues with their answers. So what is the solution in my riding lessons? Repetition, practice, different exercises which get at the same thing, every now and again going right back to basics, constant feedback and making sure that the basics are right, intuitive and so solid that they become second nature. If that works for my riding lessons I suspect it works for learning generally. Students need to write more and receive more feedback on their writing. They need to get into a habit of writing, they should write as much as possible and that writing should be critical, analytical, reflective…That may not be a popular thing to say, it means more work for students (writing) and more work for us as lecturers (marking/giving feedback) but I don’t really see any other way.
Now this may all have been completely obvious to all of you but of course the other thing about learning is that it is so much easier with context and experience, and my experience of frustration today nicely set the context for understanding something about my teaching, and feedback in particular, which I hadn’t ever consciously thought about before, which is this: Students often know what they should be doing and theoretically even how to do it but that doesn’t mean that they can do it. They need practice, lots of it!
My Conversations 