Michèle Leering on Building a Movement for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning in Legal Education

May 21
New Legal Realism Project

Here we continue our 2017/2018 blog theme, focusing on legal education. Our guest blogger Michèle Leering is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario as well as the long-time Executive Director/Lawyer of a non-profit community-based legal clinic. She believes that engaging in research on the effectiveness and impact of one’s practice is important for all legal professionals. Are we creating the change we hope to make through our work? How will we know if we are? How will we change what we are doing if we are not? Can we articulate and interrogate the tacit theories guide our practice? Her PhD research focuses on improving the competency of legal professionals through enhancing legal education. She is specifically examining the catalytic role of legal educators who are enhancing their pedagogy by modelling “reflective practice” and building their students’ capacity for disciplined and systematic reflection on what they’re doing. Legal educators engaging in formal and informal research and reflection on their professional practice – their teaching – are playing an important role in the nascent movement for a Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) in law. Legal educators have much to contribute from their tacit professional knowledge about effective and transformative teaching practices. Collaboration and common cause with educational researchers could rapidly shape and advance this scholarship. In this blog, Michèle notes challenges, chronicles promising developments, and explores next steps for articulating an inclusive framework for the SoTL in law, a movement that includes formal and informal research approaches.

***

I’ve been surfing a hopeful, self-generated wave of enthusiasm as I learn about the transformative impact of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in higher and professional education and consider its implications for legal education. Could articulating and engaging in SoTL in law help build a movement for more empirical research about legal education, strengthen our capacity to engage in this research, enhance pedagogy, and improve learning outcomes? Could it help professionalize dialogue about curricular alternatives, bring in interdisciplinary insights from other disciplines like medical education, reinvigorate teaching, and influence the trajectory of education for legal professionals? My curiosity about the opportunity SoTL provides was piqued as I forayed into my own empirical research project–a comparative case study of how “reflective practice”, a core competency in other professional disciplines, is being operationalized in Canadian and Australian law schools. I have been inspired by my interviews with legal educators and with how committed they are to interrogating and improving their legal professional practice – their teaching. I have been surprised by how little respect is accorded to their efforts to research their practice and to the intellectual labour required to become effective student-centered legal educators. As a doctoral student in the under-theorized and under-developed field of legal education scholarship, I have struggled with the paucity of precedent for conducting high quality educational research in law on par with the systematic efforts of other professional disciplines.

Should I be surprised? Legal scholars have been slow to recognize legal education research as a valuable academic endeavour and contributor to legal scholarship. British legal academic Fiona Cownie has noted “Although many legal academics are deeply involved in researching legal phenomena, relatively few of them have chosen to research aspects of the law schools in which they work, or the way in which law is taught, either theoretically or empirically” (2010, p. 855). She observed that legal educators undertaking empirical studies often did so to inform their own reflective practice about their teaching (p. 857).

This lacuna in legal education scholarship is being filled—recent blog posts here confirm this. Legal scholars are increasingly engaged in this research with teaching being progressively identified as an intellectual and scholarly pursuit in its own right. Thoughtful legal academics have stressed the need to professionalize their pedagogical practices by identifying the learning theories that guide their teaching as well as articulating their philosophy of legal education (Burridge, Hinett, Paliwala, & Varnava, 2002; Cownie, 1999; Maharg, 2007; Sullivan et al, 2007). All indications are that the quality of legal education scholarship is slowly improving, whilst realizing that past efforts were not always exemplary. Over a thousand scholarly articles and books written between 1965 and 2000 about legal education were extensively reviewed and assessed by John Ogloff, David Lyon, Kevin Douglas and Gordon Rose. They found little evidence of studies examining “what is known empirically about the nature and process of training lawyers” (2000, p. 78) and critiqued the quality of much of the then extent legal education research as methodologically unsound (with some notable exceptions such as studies by Donna Fossum, Deborah Merritt, and Barbara Reskin). Fiona Cownie also reached this conclusion although noted that this research is now becoming increasingly sophisticated in its methods and analysis:

“The best researchers in legal education draw on a wide variety of disciplines to analyze the data they uncover in new and original ways. They are sophisticated in their use of methodology, and continue to look for new perspectives to throw light on all aspects of the law school and legal education” (2010, p. 870).

Good examples of sophisticated mixed empirical research methods are evident in recent studies undertaken by the Carnegie Foundation and others (Sullivan et al., 2007; Mertz, 2007; and Schwartz, Hess, and Sparrow, 2013). These and other developments signal that the legal profession may be ready to clearly articulate what other disciplines have already named as the SoTL in their professional fields.

Where and how do we start to operationalize a SoTL unique to law? How can we build on a myriad of promising developments in legal education research and concern about pedagogy, especially in evidence in (but not exclusive to) the last decade? What can we learn from other disciplines like medicine that have embraced SoTL? This blog post isn’t intended to extensively explore the SoTL but instead to raise awareness and questions about how it could benefit legal education. In the next paragraph I introduce a high level overview of the field to set the stage for further investigation.

Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate is often cited as launching the movement. Published in 1990 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it was a clarion call to end the unproductive debate of “education versus research”. Boyer introduced a four-fold framework for scholarly activity, requiring a scholarship of discovery (original research or investigation), of integration (insights from other disciplines), of application, and of teaching. Several more Carnegie Foundation sponsored publications followed including Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene I. Maeroff’s Scholarship Assessed in 1997.  Charles E. Glassick further delineated six standards for scholarship: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique (2000, p. 879). A growing number of SoTL journals are now being published and the field has become more theoretically rich, sometimes contested, and more particular about high quality research. In 2011, this rise in interest in the SoTL was attributed by Pat Hutchings, Mary Taylor Huber, and Antony Ciccone’s The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered to an increasing educator’s interest and inquiry into teaching and learning, and whether and how their students are learning effectively. Educators are taking a more evidence-based and theoretically-grounded approach to their teaching. It is also linked to “teaching as community property” (Shulman, 1993) and a “teaching commons” approach (Huber & Hutchings, 2005), including communities of practice and faculty learning communities.

I’m heartened by so many promising developments in legal education, a number of which I list below in order to give a sense of the current progress of formal and informal scholarship. These are in addition to this New Realism blog post series that has informed us about the Australian-created on-line resources for law professors concerned about their pedogogy (Smart Casual), the new AALS section on empirical study of legal education and the profession, randomized control trials and the new LSA Collaborative Research Network proposed by John Bliss and colleagues.

What next steps could be considered to strengthen the movement towards the SoTL in law?

How can we collaboratively better situate empirical and theoretical legal education research as a scholarly endeavour, map the intellectual territory, identify critical components of the field (an inclusive big “tent” please!), build a taxonomy, and map fruitful areas for research? I hope we can consider both formal and informal research efforts, including exploring action research as a qualitative research methodology well suited for the study and enhancement of legal education. Action research is a form of research that is used when there is a desire to improve practice and/or create change (Baumfield, Hall & Wall, 2013; Merriam & Simpson, 2000). Largely described as an inductive research strategy, it is used to develop knowledge and theory about a problem that is not well understood whilst encouraging action and reflection in a cyclical and disciplined investigative process that incrementally and iteratively changes the situation as it is being researched (Leering, 2017). I welcome reflective and generative dialogue on how we might move forward into this space.

Could we start a virtual community of practice of legal education researchers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom? How can we build on best of existing research methodologies in legal education research? We need to look to other professional disciplines like education and medicine, and allied health professions. They have a proud history of empirically investigating the effectiveness of their professional practice, including how they teach. There is much to learn from their efforts and many lessons learned that are transferable to legal education.

As individual “practitioner-researchers” (Jarvis, 1998)—how can we begin to increase our understanding of educational theory and to scale up our skills for conducting valid and reliable empirical research? There are many methods to choose from in conducting research in legal education, and many research studies that are relevant to legal education from other disciplines that can inform teaching and learning strategies in law. In my view, a capacity for action research is an essential tool in the repertoire of the reflective legal professional—whether educator or practitioner. Action research, as a practical, sustainable research methodology, can help increase understanding and knowledge about the challenge or problem posed, while surfacing tacit knowledge so that it can be shared, simultaneously generating a solution, and empowering participants in the face of what can seem insurmountable barriers to improving pedagogy and student learning.

A final musing:  Is it too utopian to consider that law students witnessing legal educators engaged in empirical research to evaluate and improve their teaching might be inspired to become more reflective about their professional practice when they graduate?

 

Reference List

Baumfield, V., Hall, E., & Wall, K. (2013).Action research in education (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publishing Ltd.

Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.

Burridge, R., Hinett, K., Paliwala, A., & Varnava, T. (Eds.). (2002). Effective learning and teaching in law. Sterling, VA: Kogan Page, Stylus Publishing.

Cownie, F. (1999). Searching for theory in teaching law. In F. Cownie (Ed.). The law school – Global issues, local questions (pp. 41–61). Brookfield, VT: Ashgate.

Cownie, F. (2010). Legal education and the academy. In Peter Cane & Herbert M. Kritzer, The Oxford handbook of empirical legal research (pp. 852–872).  New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Glassick, C. E. (2010). Boyer’s expanded definitions of scholarship, the standards for assessing scholarship, and the elusiveness of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Academic Medicine, 75(9), 877–880.

Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T., & Maeroff, G. I. (1997). Scholarship assessed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Huber, M. T., & Hutchings, P. (2005). The advancement of learning: Building the teaching commons. Stanford, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Hutchings, P., Huber, M. T., & Ciccione, A. (2011). The scholarship of teaching and learning reconsidered. CA: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.

Jarvis, P. (1999). The practitioner-researcher: Developing theory from practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Leering, M. M. (2017). Enhancing the legal profession’s capacity for innovation: The promise of reflective practice and action research for increasing access to justice. Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, 34, 189–221.

Le Brun, M., & Johnstone, R. (1994). The quiet revolution: Improving student learning in law. Sydney, AU: The Law Book Company.

Maharg, P. (2007). Transforming legal education: Learning and teaching the law in the early twenty-first century. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Maranville, D., Bliss, L. R., Kaas, C. W., & Lopez, A. S. (Eds.). (2015). Building on best practices: Transforming legal education in a changing world. San Francisco, CA: LexisNexis.

Merriam, S. B., & Simpson, E. L. (2000). A guide to research for educators and trainers of adults. Malabar, VL: Krieger Publishing.

Mertz, E. (2007). The language of law school: Learning to “think like a lawyer”. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ogloff, J. R. P., Lyon, D. R., Douglas, K. S., & Rose, V G. (2000). More than “learning to think like a lawyer”: The empirical research on legal education. Creighton Law Review, 34, 73–244.

Schwartz, M. H., Hess, G. F., & Sparrow, S. M. (2013). What the best law teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shulman, L. S. (1993). Teaching as community property: Putting an end to pedagogical solitude. Change, 25(6), 6–7.

Stuckey, R., et al. (2007). Best practices for legal education: A Vision and a roadmap. Denver, CO: Clinical Legal Education Association.

Sullivan, W. M., Colby, A., Wegner, J. W., Bond, L., & Shulman, L .S. (2007). Educating lawyers: Preparation for the profession of law, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.