100 Days of Wonder – #60
Today I want to pause to celebrate my students past and present. They’re all absolute stars. Yep that’s the link to the picture. Sorry. But actually there’s more of a link. I didn’t really ‘get’ the importance and value of celebrating success and being told you’re doing or have done a good job. I found the mostly American culture of ‘good job for existing’ level of praise and affirmation quite jarring and irritating the first time I really witnessed it properly during the first Disney trip in 2006. Yep well done, you are an adult and you managed breathe all day today. I thought it was all a bit pathetic really.
But of course that first Disney trip was before I had any genuine sense that just existing could be so fucking hard. I have u-turned on this. Give yourself and others all the praise, love and affirmation you can. Over the last 20 years I have seen over and over again the power that believing in someone can have, the power that saying ‘good job’ or ‘Well done’ can have and I remember so vividly the impact it had on me when life got hard. So you, yep you who struggled to get out of bed today – you’re awesome. And you who spent all day hiding and crying because life is shit right now, well done for getting through today. You who fought your bastard demons today – I see you and I’m proud of you. And for those of you who are happy today, those who had a great day and for whom things are really good. I am genuinely happy and excited for you. (I mean that genuinely but however I write this it always seems to sound sarcastic – not meant to)
So celebrating students. I have finished teaching for this semester and assessment season is upon us and somehow we are collectively making a mess of this in higher education . The anxiety we create is unreal! Assessment should not be this stressful! Sure, nerves are normal but wow society and the education system pile on the pressure. What are we doing? Assessment should be the celebration of learning. It should be a chance to show off the journey and demonstrate mastery of new knowledge and skills. Over the last couple of weeks I have read genuinely insightful work, watched brilliant presentations and had really deep and sometimes heartbreaking conversations. All my students are juggling life in ways that many of us in our privileged academic bubbles can barely imagine and yet they jump through our anxiety inducing hoops and come out fighting for a better world. I am so unbelievably proud of all of them. The kids are alright, you know and I’m never going to stop telling them that.
100 Days of Wonder – #15
Yesterday I talked about fun. When I was at university in Leicester I would frequently visit my then girlfriend who was doing a degree in PE teaching in Chichester. The way my timetable fell I could often stay for a chunk during the week. I’d take work with me and while she was out in lectures and then playing cricket or rugby, I would wade through contract law cases and work out why, as a 19 year old, I should care about Administrative Law. I distinctly remember declining to join a game of rounders and not even joining the spectators sitting in the sun sipping something pink and alcoholic. Instead I opted for a book. My girlfriend’s comment was: Well you’re no fun. It was a theme that came up repeatedly and at the time I remember being defensive about it. I was fun. Of course I was fun. But was I?
I don’t know. I think it took me a long time to work out ‘fun’. I was bookish and serious and independent and ‘grown up’ as a kid. I continue to be fiercely independent but those moments of silliness and laughing so much that you (nearly -hm) pee yourself that I had always treated as rare and very private moments are now moments I embrace and I’m proud of. I no longer take myself or anything particularly seriously. Fun for me has never been about parties, big groups, playing sports or pranking each other which is I think what Rachel was referring to when she put me in the ‘not fun’ box. Fun for me has been about stories, about shared moments that touch the soul, about seeing others light up and mostly about seeing the ridiculousness of most things in life. Sometimes teaching and researching in law doesn’t lend itself to being fun. I bump up against inequality at best and atrocities at worst all the time in my work, some student stories a re heartbreaking and law is, after all a serious business… but finding your brand of silliness and fun seems to me to be crucial to making sure we look after ourselves when we’re doing work that can be emotional and hard. So if you think I’m mad as a hatter and a bit juvenile – you’d be right, I just don’t think that’s a bad thing.
The Law Teacher: The International Journal of Legal Education
Last month, Professor Chris Ashford and I stepped down as General Editors of The Law Teacher and handed over the journal to Dr Emma Jones. Honestly, it’s a funny feeling. The Law Teacher has given me so much over the course of my career, working with Chris has been such a joy and such a rich learning experience and in one way or the other I have always somehow worked on something related to the Law Teacher. I wasn’t going to write anything beyond a quick tweet to mark the occasion but since then, my time linked to the Law Teacher keeps popping into my head.
I published my first book review in the Law Teacher in Issue 1 of 2008, just a few months after starting my first lectureship. I published my first article in the Law Teacher in 2009 (Issue 2) – A Case for Timeturners. I look back on that paper now it and it is somehow completely naive and yet hopeful at the same time. I should maybe write an update. The Editorial of Issue 1 of 2010 welcomes me (and others) to the board and I had forgotten that Chris and I joined at the same time. Over the next few years I had a go at editing book reviews as well as the Policy and Educational Developments sections. Then in 2014, Chris took over as General Editor of the journal and I joined as his Deputy. I remember thinking that I really wasn’t quite sure how I had found myself in that position and hoped that nobody would notice that I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. in 2018 I got the chance to edit my first special issue (a reflection on the Legal Education and Training Review and a great change to critique the thinking on the SQE as it was then).
We found our feet fairly quickly, we did battle with Editorial Manager, our new online submission system (and if it is possible for a system to actively dislike a person, EM hated me) and we sort of dealt with stuff that came up. We bounced ideas off each other, stepped in to support each other, sense checked each other and reminded each other that we’d also need other voices because we are too similar in our approach to most things. We expanded the editorial board, we established a peer review college, we drove up the quality of work submitted and published and we actively tried to support the legal education community through workshops and being available for conversations. We introduced social media editors to raise the profile of the journal…We did a lot. It’s hard to know now where the ideas came from, I would probably say Chris but actually maybe it was the combination that worked and we had a fantastic team who made the magic happen (and still do).
I think we’ve always care about our authors as much as our readers (because often they are the same!). We read submissions with care and encouraged our reviewers to do the same and respond with constructive kindness. Reading work submitted to a journal is a huge privilege, the author is trusting you with it, probably feels anxious about how it will be received, wants you to like it and in return you get to shape it a little, help make it better, sometimes encourage the re-think it needs to be amazing. We did all of this, mostly without major glitches and mostly just getting on with it – although we definitely had our moments… and then Covid hit.
Lots happened in that time that showcased the nasty side of academia but also the kindness of colleagues, friends and strangers and to cut a long, horrible and for most other people rather boring story short, I wasn’t well. I tried to keep functioning but I wasn’t. As is so often the case in situations like that, I tried to first resign from all the nice things, the things that actually made it possible for me to survive in academia. Chris and the Law Teacher Team encouraged me to stay on, just step back and take the time I needed. When I returned I returned as Co-General Editor alongside Chris with a strengthened and fabulous Editor Team. And now, 10 years after working on the first issue as General and Deputy Editor, we have delivered our final issue as Co-Editors. 10 years just flew by and now there is a Law Teacher shaped hole appearing in my working life – appearing slowly because I haven’t vanished from the journal. For a start both Chris and I stay on as Consultant Editors but I am also seeing through the articles that happened to still be assigned to me and I am also co-editing a Special Issue (more on that another time – it’s shaping up to be fabulous though). The journal is in safe hands with a brilliant team of editors now led by Emma so I am excited to see what the future holds for the Law Teacher and what it feels like to view it as just another academic interested in legal education.
My Conversations 