Teaching EU Law?
It looks like I will again be teaching EU law next academic year. I am sort of excited about this but I am also already thinking and worrying about it. Most students don’t really enjoy EU law and many find it boring and difficult and frankly irrelevant to them. So what am I going to teach and how and why?
Well, we have a first year course which is all about the EU instituions, law making etc – what you might call the instituional, administrative and constitutional elements. Our Level 2 course is a substantive law course which has always focused on free movement of goods, services and persons. I can’t change that too much as the modules are validated along those lines.
So my plan for year one is to focus on the legal elements of EU integration and think about how law and legal processes have pushed the integration agenda. I want to think about power relationships between actors, relationships between institutions and between Member States and the EU and each other. I want to think about gender awareness in this context – well because that’s my thing and because it gives me an angle to make this more engaging.
Year 2 – well I guess I will stick to mostly free movement stuff but I think I will start with questions around EU migration and explore contexts of highly skilled, low skilled, economic activity, other activity, meanings of citizenship etc. Maybe there is scope here to also explore the external dimensions and some Human Rights stuff. I’d like to do less of the goods and services stuff because that’s not where my interest and expertise lies – although there are some cracking cases and having an understanding of the internal market is useful and important.
I’m thinking if not recommending a specific textbook but prepare detailed reading lists based on online material, a fairly detailed module manual and journal articles, blogs as well as some textbook chapters. So, what do you think? Any suggestions for how to make these EU modules stand out, make them interesting and engaging. Suggestions for coverage, approach, materials? What do you do? What works?
Lovely to hear a ‘thanks for today’
‘Thanks for today’. Just three little words made all the difference to me earlier this week. I’d been teaching my first ever Legal Skills workshop block which runs over 4 hours from 9am to 1pm. I was pretty happy with it. Some of the timing was a little off and it could do with a little more activity based stuff in the first half but essentially it worked well. It was quite hard to gauge the student reception. They were pretty alert, mostly on time, they came back after breaks, they did the tasks, they asked some sensible questions… and many said ‘thanks’ in the sort of generic way you say thanks when you are leaving somewhere where you’ve had a not too horrid time. However, 3 students separately did more than that and made an effort to come by, make eye contact and actually say ‘thanks for today Jess’. None will have known how nervous I was before I started that session and none will have known how welcome their comment was after 4 hours of pretty full on teaching. Knowing that to some students I made a little bit of a difference is why I do what I do. So, the nerves have gone now (see earlier post) and have been replaced with a very familiar end of September feeling – a sense of happy exhaustion.
Teaching is about to start and I am getting more nervous by the minute
Why? I’ve been doing this for a while now. My first lecture is an Employment Law lecture providing a brief history of employment law and an overview of the key institutions. I first gave it in September 2007 and it hasn’t changed substantially. I know what I’m doing – and yet, the little butterflies are slowly turning into big winged dragons in my tummy. And it’s not like I am not prepared. All my materials are ready, copied and laid out in my office for the first week, the second week is ready – in fact apart from a total of 6 lectures across my 4 modules, everything is prepared. If I fall under a bus today, someone can come in and just run with it… so the nerves.
I don’t like being the centre of attention, not really. I’m too self-conscious. I’m not naturally extrovert. I’m not shy exactly and I do have confidence in my abilities but I’m actually more of a ‘behind the scenes’ kinda girl. But let’s face it, a lecture theatre full of about 100 strangers or pretty much strangers is a scary prospect and it’s even scarier if it falls to you to keep those 100 strangers entertained and informed. It’s a performance and performances are nerve-wracking. The adrenalin is part of what makes a good performance – so I keep telling myself. I will therefore be focusing my efforts not on trying not to be nervous, I know that won’t work; but on trying to channel those nerves away from dry mouth, can’t speak, sweaty palms kind of nerves to productive nerves.
For all those of you new to teaching who are nervous about it, I’d love to tell you it gets easier and the nerves go away but they haven’t for me, not at the start of term anyway. It’s just that I have experienced all of this before and therefore know that I will get to the end of the lecture and when I do I will have loved it. I will be exhausted but elated and because I know that, stepping into the lecture theatre on Monday at 11am will be tummy – churning hell – but in a good way, if that makes any sense at all.
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