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
Society of Legal Scholars Day 2
As I outlined briefly yesterday, Day 2 started with me not running and having a slow morning gathering my thoughts and enjoying not plunging straight into my emails and not dealing with the day to day. I walked up to the uni in a gap in the showers and found the room in which my PhD student was presenting. The audience was almost non existent when I got there although a few more people arrived. There were three papers in the session and I struggled to focus on them. The first was probably interesting but was almost entirely read out which meant I lost interest within about a minute. The second was better but not something I knew anything about. The third paper was of course fabulous. It s a different sort of nervousness watching your students or mentees give papers. I really wanted the experience to be a positive one. I’m certainly biased but I thought her presentation was by far the best of the three and I was very proud of her.
Then I went back to Legal Education having missed a couple of papers I had marked – by people I know though so I can catch up with them later. This session was a bit problematic for me. The first paper was interesting and had lots of good stuff in about personalisation of teaching and feedback and also about student expectations etc but I have concerns about the approach, heavily reliant on Myers-Briggs personality type teasing but without being trained in Myers Briggs. It did make me think about how we can talk to students about where they are in their journey, their skills and knowledge to understand more what they need from us. And of course that’s different for each student. The second paper shouldn’t have been there and was just a bit of a car crash.
That made me think too though… what’s the responsibility of conveyors in ensuring the appropriateness of papers? Can they be checked more without filtering out non obvious gems? What’s the role of Chairs in putting both speaker and audience out of their misery? And how do you manage that sensitively because you never know what’s going on for the speakers in the background! Anyway, then we had lunch and then I found a quiet spot to catch up with some other stuff before the plenary session. As I sat there it suddenly felt unbearably noisy, and in spite of hiding away in a corner there were people everywhere… before I really thought about it I packed my stuff up and left. I checked my heart rate (whoa!) and breathing as I walked down towards the hotel. I thought about what to do. I had time to walk a little and then go back to the plenary but in the end I decided I needed time out.
I had a little rest, maybe even dozed off for ten minutes or so. Then I got my running gear on to head out. It wasn’t entirely successful as my legs are so tight. My ankles started niggling almost immediately but I managed a mile, then I stopped and stretched and then did another mile run/walk, stopped to stretch again and then mostly walked another mile with a few jogs thrown in. It helped. I felt well enough to go to Dinner. Dinner was just dinner with a quiz I had no interest in, a pretty good speech and good conversation on my table. By the end I was really tired but otherwise ok.
I slept well. I woke up just before 6 and lazily snuggled back into bed for a little while before deciding to go out and run. As I walked around the room though my Achilles niggled and my calves felt tight so I instead I did some yoga, had breakfast, did some more yoga and then slowly walked up to the uni ready to start the Day 3 with the AGM.
Society of Legal Scholars Day 1
I am trying the conference thing again. It’s probably better than spending the next week or so in the office with everyone around me trying to absorb the pressures of the start of term. Still I am conscious that depression has kept me on the sofa much more than I would like and that anxiety levels have been generally high. I am working on the re-set but it’s not easy. So when I set off yesterday it didn’t seem like a great idea to be heading into people and give a paper based mostly on personal experience and reflection.
Travel was a bit irritating because the trains into Bradford and then back out to Preston didn’t match at all. I sat at Bradford interchange for 40 minutes watching the world go by…. that’s another story! Then I got on my little train and pootled towards Lancashire through the familiar northern landscape. It suddenly felt important to be staying in the north. Safer, less pressured, more familiar. I watched the hills and fields come and go and longed to be out there breathing the fresh air. I went over my paper. I stared into space and then a few blokes with dogs got on the the dogs were scary and I hoped they would get off at Preston so I didn’t have to go past. I was also suddenly very aware of my own privilege, of what having a job and a secure income at a level where worrying about money isn’t a thing really means; how rare that is in these northern towns I was passing through. I felt both lucky and powerless.
Preston. I walked from the station to the hotel to leave my bags and realised that some time out before people would be good. I found a Costa coffee and had a peppermint tea and bar of dark chocolate. I like Preston. It’s real. It’s a bit of a dump of course, there’s the university and there’s poverty and not much else but the people are real, they are friendly and welcoming and I couldn’t help smiling all the time. I belong in towns like Preston (or Keighley), it feels right. I slowly walked up to the university passing huge building sites and lost in my thoughts. I registered, I bought books, I chatted to one or two people and then it was time for session 1 and my paper.
The session started with Caroline Strevens (Portsmouth) ‘Challenging Assumptions:revisiting the Law Curriculum’ and her paper was packed full of fabulous ideas centred around self determination, motivation, mindsets and teamwork being the answer. I do think self determination theory is useful and it can tell us something about how universities get things wrong by undermining academics and their intrinsic motivation and how we get this wrong with our students too and basically force them to focus on extrinsic motivating factors… I am not sure about teamwork being the answer. I don’t know enough but as an introvert and someone who quite likes working alone and did as a student I wonder…
Then it was me. My paper reflects on two of my publications from 2008 and 2009 both written in the 2007/08 academic year and suggests that I was perhaps rather naive then and got some things wrong, not least arguing for a time turner to make the academic job doable. Instead, I suggest in this paper, we should make better use of an invisibility cloak and marauderers’ map (I do indeed solemnly swear that I am up to no good) to help us do things our way and defend against the dark arts (of neoliberalism, managerialism , marketisation, metrics, ranking, the glorification of busyness…) I am actually really looking forward to properly writing this one up.
The third paper in the session was be Steven Vaughan (UCL) and was, as always, a treat. I love the way Steven presents, it appears easy and effortless and pulls you in. The paper was one I had heard before but that didn’t matter. Steven told us about his work on the structure of LLB programmes and in particular the core subjects. I have often asked why the core is the core. In fact I ask my students and part of me loves the fact that we don’t really know, that it seems to be a historical accident and one which we can’t rally justify on pedagogical or legal grounds. The core is the core because it’s what was predominantly being taught when the core was decided but there were other subjects in contention too. What I find utterly fascinating though is that colleagues often find it impossible to imagine something else. That when you ask them to design a law degree starting with a blank page they start with what they now understand to be the core but they can’t articulate why.
I can write about what I would put in a law degree another time but for now let’s just say I’m not wedded to the core, I wouldn’t teach in the current modular silos and I am not sure I would make anything compulsory other than a sort of legal skills, methods etc course. I see logistical argument for first year compulsory modules but I am struggling for pedagogical and legal ones. But I digress.
I had coffee, there were too many people, I briefly considered going back to the hotel but then just went to the next legal education session instead. It wasn’t a great choice. The papers were just not really my thing. The first was by Roland Fletcher (OU) about apprenticeships and I think I was tired and stopped listening properly. The second was a panel on workplace focused law degrees and while what they were doing seemed quite interesting there is something about the focus of law programmes on providing legal experience to the exclusion of all others that annoys me. It perpetuates the myth that what we do is about our students becoming lawyers and that a degree is/should be about employability. Of course I am being unfair here, they might be doing all sorts and just sharing this particular aspect. I would have liked more on the literature and context though rather than just a ‘here’s what we are doing’ sort of thing.
I went back to the hotel, dumped my bag and checked in and then went back for drinks and dinner. They were fine, conversation was easy because I was with people I knew and people I was content to just listen to. The entertainment folk singing went on for a few songs longer than I felt happy with and I was glad for some air and me time on the walk back. I slept badly. I woke early. I wondered about going for a run but it was raining cats and dogs and the bed was comfy and I felt achey. I didn’t want a battle in my head, I wanted a slow morning. And that’s what I’ve had. Nearly time for SLS Day 2 now!
My Conversations 