Zeugma

Reflections on LILAC 2009

Great conference, excellently organised as always.  If you’re in legal education anywhere in the world and you’ve never been, you really need to get yourself over to it.  So much is here for you: lots of practical stuff on so many aspects of educational practice, plenty of absorbing theory, increasingly international viewpoints, regulatory bodies and their work, and much else – as well as great food and entertainment from what’s become the house band, The 39 Steps.  The wiki was first rate, so useful, and very well supported too by Ann Priestley and the rest of the team -- maybe next year something like Ning might be even better...

Plenary lecture

Fine keynote by Ian Ward (abstract, paper & slides at the link).  Thoughtful, provoking, and over a wide range of pedagogical issues. Two comments:

Parallel session 5: Negotiation; Second Life

First session concerned negotiation.  Having arrived late (busy talking to others), I caught the idea that it was focused on negotiation practice and techniques as confidence building, and helping students to engage with each other on legal materials, and with those materials.  Helpful session that gave practical pointers to the session participants.  

Parallel session 3: SIMPLE

Sat in on the SIMPLE ref session, given by Karen Barton and Patricia McKellar.  Good overview of the project, its software, use, evaluation and future use.  Interesting to sit in and see the project from the audience point of view.  There’s such a lot of new angles to teaching, learning and assessment in the project that it is difficult to cover it even in a 45 minute session.  

Parallel session 4: Pot luck for students; interactive technology in teaching law

Attended Lisa Cherkassky's (U. of Bradford)  session on variation in teaching, and how this affects students.  It's a critical issues, not least in team teaching.  In Scotland, the Diploma in Legal Practice is taught  by tutor-practitioners, and at GGSL we (Karen, Frances Murray, David Sillars and me) always need to compromise between allowing tutors their individual voices, and yet adhere to a coherent programme of study.  Lisa focused on the problem of tutor variation in team teaching where variation can cause particular problems.  She outline feedback she obtained, and her solutions.  

Parallel session 2: Beyond Text in Legal Education project; Cultivating Lawyers

I've written about this in an earlier blog posting, but I wanted to turn up for the screening of the film of the two days' acivities in the Talbot Rice Gallery.  The film was interesting (I don't appear in it, thank goodness, given my dance abilities...), and music was great.  Watch it.  I think it will be available from the Beyond Text website sometime soon.  

LILAC 2009 - Using wikis in legal education; emotional intelligence in legal education

I'm live-blogging the Learning in Law Annual Conference at Warwick.  First session in the parallel set was Clark Cunningham and Nigel Duncan on Ethics in the undergraduate curriculum: an international wiki community.  Very interesting and effective session...

Why go Beyond Text?

Beyond Text is an AHRC-funded project which sets itself the ambitious goal of enabling lawyers, law educators and law students to use their ethical imagination.  The project seeks to do so by creating 

a space where the ethical imagination can be inculcated and the movement beyond can be experienced in non-textual ways. We want to create a space where there will be opportunities for learning ’through the body’, and thereby to investigate the unique kind of knowledge (known in the literature as “embodied knowledge”) that may emerge from this improvisatory practice. 

Is this important?  Should legal educators bother with this stuff?