sls legal education presentation

The Redress of Legal Education

Paul MahargDirk Rodenburg

preview1. Heaney’s concept of redress in poetic theory2. Redress of legal education3. Re-interpretations and re-readings of [legal] educational history4. Organisation of research activity5. Development of sound educational frameworks and strategies to support

the adoption of new digital technologies in legal education

• Slides available at: http://paulmaharg.com/slides

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1. Heaney’s redress of poetry

Seamus Heaney and the redress of poetry

‘Professors of poetry, apologists for it, practitioners of it, from Sir Philip Sydney to Wallace Stevens, all sooner or later are tempted to show how poetry’s existence as a form of art relates to our existence as citizens of society – how it is “of present use.”’ (Heaney 1995, 1)

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‘Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.’ (Heaney 1995, 5)

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‘[Poetry’s] power as a mode of redress […] – as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a presssure established by distinctly linguistic means.’ (Heaney 1995, 5-6)

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Heaney notes the OED’s four entries for ‘redress’, including ‘”To set (a person or a thing) upright again; to raise again to an erect position. Also fig. to set up again, restore, re-establish.”’ (Heaney 1995, 15)

But he wants more than the restoration of poetry to itself:

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‘[…] I want to profess the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability; I want to celebrate its given, unforeseeable thereness, the way it enters our field of vision and animates our physical and intelligent being,’ (Heaney 1995, 15)

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‘[This] reminds me of a further (obsolete) meaning of ‘redress’, with which I would conclude [...]: “Hunting. To bring back (the hounds or deer) to the proper course.” In this “redress” there is no hint of ethical obligation; it is more a matter of finding a course for the breakaway of innate capacity, a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential.’ (Heaney 1995, 15)

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‘In other words, whatever the possibilities of achieving political harmony at an institutional level, I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.’ (Heaney 1995, 213)

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2. Redressing legal education

redress and legal education• Legal education requires redressing in all Heaney’s

senses, but particularly the last. • Redress involves a constant process of re-aligning, a

sensing what education is and where it takes us.• We need to dwell upon the phenomenological, the

‘thereness’, of educational experience• We also need to reconcile the practical and the visionary

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Paul Maharg, Dirk Rodenburg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 SCOTLAND | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA|

Dewey: 1916/2016Reflective learning – the relationship between experience and thinking – is characterised as:‘(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a conjectural anticipation—a tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to them a tendency to affect certain consequences; (iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent; (v) taking one stand upon the project hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated result, thereby testing the hypothesis.’ (Dewey 1916, 150)

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3. Re-interpretations & re-readings of legal educational history: The

rhetoric of reading

What is everywhere passes unnoticed. Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and nothing is less well known. Reading is taken for granted to such an extent that at first glance it seems nothing need be said about it.(Todorov, 1978, p. 39).

strategies for reading …What I said to my adult learners:•Read forward – no recursive reading•Listen to your expectations for word clusters•Be aware of context’s effect on meaning•Cope with loss of power & agency while you’re reading•Form good habits and discipline

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Panmure Lute MSS (c.1632), 5, no.3.

Music for Lute Consort, c.1500

Strategies for reading music…What my lute tutor said to me:•Read forward – no recursive reading•Listen to your harmonic expectations•Be aware of context•Cope with playing and expression while reading•Form good habits and discipline

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strategies for reading law

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(what I told myself)

the transitive powerof music notation…

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Panmure Lute MS (c.1632), 5, no.3.

Music for Lute Consort, c.1500

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Narrative event diagram, Personal Injury Transaction: Pursuer

… could be used as simulation notation

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Narrative event diagram: Personal Injury Transaction: Pursuer and Defender (Gould et al 2009)

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Compare lute tablature across two staveswith simulation notation

3. Organisation of legal educational research

future research needs1. Map the field & create

taxonomies for research data

2. Organise systematic data collection onlaw school stats across entry/exit points, across jurisdictions (eg using Big Data Project methods)

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future research needs3. Focus on learning, not NSS league tables

– see US LSSSE… and include longitudinalresearch data, not just snapshotsof place & time

4. Provide meta-reviews and systematic summaries of research, where appropriate; literature guides, etc

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how might professional bodiescontribute to this?

1. Targeted funding for research initiatives, eg Cochrane Collaboration type of initiative from both regulators and professional bodies

2. Funding & admin support to start-up and analyze innovation – eg PBL, public education in law, legal informatics,data visualization, etc

3. Financial & other support to enable round tablemeetings with regulators and comparative workwith other jurisdictions – globally

4. Creation and maintenance of a digital hub.

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5. Development of sound educational frameworks and strategies to support the adoption of new digital technologies in legal education

Some initial thoughts to frame the conversation…• Technology is a means to an end• The fundamentals of good education do not change (debate,

critical interrogation, pain, uncertainty, struggle, interstitial moments of clarity)

• We should seek moments of “transformation” (“threshold concepts” – irrevocable changes in perspective)

• Practice (the application of knowledge) is not a poor cousin

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So what does that mean for the frameworks supporting new digital tools in legal education?

• Digital tools should be considered within the context of specific educational objectives– Think boldly and broadly about the rationale– Pick a target– Define your outcomes (as painful as this may be)– Define the role of the digital tool in supporting those outcomes– Support adoption (the challenges of which are either under-estimated,

or become the end of the program)

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Let’s take an example – Legal decision making in practice

• The desire to situate legal reasoning and decision making in authentic contexts

– Objective: enable students to better integrate theory and practice

– Outcomes: students will experience the challenges, discomfort and uncertainties associated with providing legal services

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Teaching praxis is a “noble” enterprise• Think of all of the highly nuanced skills we all execute day to

day, skills that were hard won and are so challenging to teach– Establishing your role and limitations– Working as a well-coordinated team– Collaboration– Taking and defending a position (in work, not litigation)– Negotiating a common path– Establishing and carrying a common vision– Effectively articulating and communicating that vision

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Lessons from Medicine• Struggle to reconcile theoretical and clinical knowledge• Often seen by students as two unrelated domains• McMaster University pioneered PBL as a solution to integration• Clinically focused problems within a clinical context served as

the gateway to theoretical knowledge• Clinical decision making is grounded in the “hard truths” of

clinical practice

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Lessons from Medicine• Let clinical practice drive theoretical knowledge• Use high / low fidelity clinical contexts to support integration

– Problem based learning– Simulated patients– Grand rounds– Clerkships– Residencies– Early supervised practice

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Digital Tool – Online Intelligent Simulation

• Distributed• Scalable• “Thick authenticity”• Non-prescriptive• Challenging

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Queen’s Law – OCE Grant to Develop Simulation Platform

• Queen’s Law recently submitted and won a $250,000 industry / academic partnership grant to develop “intelligent” simulation platform

• Key objective is to create an authoring platform that enables any individual or group to develop highly compelling, complex simulations – pan-disciplinary: law, medicine, engineering, business

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Platform Characteristics

• Back-end connectivity to cognitive computing platform (IBM Watson) is completely hidden from simulation creators

• Platform will integrate guided instructional framework into authoring platform

• Narrative, characters, roles, context, are all created by simulation authors

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“Intelligent” Simulation• Student’s experience:

– Present student(s) with a scenario, a role and a timeline– Ask the student(s) to begin interacting with intelligent characters in

the scenario in a non-prescriptive manner– Provide students with realistic character interactions that reflected an

authentic context– Enable students to access context driven content and feedback– Allow students to “replay” and reflect on their interactions following

the simulation

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“Intelligent” Simulation• Simulation creators’ experience:

– “Deep” engagement with the material• Choose domain, boundaries and constraints• Choose specific learning outcomes• Develop narratives, characters and contexts that support the outcomes• Model “real world” interactions (conduct, communication, ethics, competing

interests)• Develop supporting materials• Anticipate student reactions, problems, challenges

– Actively seeking “transformative” moments for the student leads to transformation in instructional perspective

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Other (Longer Term) Objectives

• Work collaboratively cross-institutionally (Paul Maharg and PEARL)

• Develop an embedded assessment framework to measure simulation performance

• Develop an embedded analytics engine to harness simulation data for both research and simulation development purposes

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Paul MahargEmail:paul.maharg@anu.edu.auWeb: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides

Dirk RodenburgEmail: dirk.Rodenburg@queensu.caWeb: law.queensu.caSlides: TBD

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