At the behest of Dr Paulina Wilson of QUB I recently wrote a short piece for the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly series called Reflections on Teaching. Around 5,000 words. Usually it takes me 5K to draw breath, so it was quite a challenge to reflect on 44 years in education, 34 of them in legal education, and say something coherent. So I started with the obvious, and yet not quite so obvious – the title’s double tilde linking the three concepts as strongly equivalent to each other, and suggesting that problems arise when that valence is broken or eroded in some way or other.

The first section was called Introit because it concerned my experiences as a law student, back in 1990-92, having already a doctorate in nineteenth century literature, a postgrad PGCE & Diploma in Education, and taught a range of adult ed classes for around seven years. It dwelt on our beginnings in the discipline of law, how they matter, how they unfold for students and teachers on either side of the clear glass that divides teaching & learning; how intentions are difficult to convey but essential to be clear about, on both sides. WS Graham put that duality well in a personal context, in a teasing letter to Ruth Hilton:

I’m seeing you now. You’re seeing me now and this is us meeting and we at least know that. Though I wish some other person were looking to see us both seeing each other across the old nuisance of language which gets a bit dark or hazy or is it steaming up because we’re breathing too close for comfort. I’ve tried to wipe my side clean how’s yours.¹

Teaching and learning are presences on two sides of the glass, aware of each other, anxious to define each other, as Graham puts it in his profound poem on education and the arts, Johan Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons.²

But it was also an introit into writing and research about legal education. I’ve always mistrusted the distinction commonly made between scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) and educational research – that the first is in some sense a lite version of the second. The relationship is too complex and imbricated. If as teachers we were to be, as the remarkable educationalist Lawrence Stenhouse put it back in the 1980s, researchers of our own practices, we needed to be able to move between the fields: practising, reading, researching, writing. And so finding my voice as a legal educator involved bringing all my experiences in the Arts and Education to bear; but also bringing those intellectual and practical experiences to bear on the research I would produce as well; and harnessing all to whatever opportunities that came my way in my career.³

‘Digitalis’ is the middle section but deals with beginnings there too, in my development of a hypertext program back in 1992 to help law students learn how to write problem-based essays. That arose from my own perplexity in coping with the genre as a law student. Working with an inspirational educator, Joe Thomson, Regius Prof at Glasgow U Law School, we built the program that did two things: it gave problem scenarios and examples of good essays on the problems (Joe’s contributions) along with discussions of how to write good essays, taking account of process as well as product (my contributions).

It was the third such program I’d written.⁴ I realised by then what was needed was an interdisciplinary discourse: law and legal educational materials; compositional process research readings and applications; education as well as hypertext theory and practice I’d picked up in the previous two years of using Guide Hypermedia, all leavened with the experience of being a law student still raw in mind.⁵ My article, published in the first issue of the Journal of Information, Law & Technology, was an apprentice piece in writing about digital education.⁶

I was entranced by the potential of digital; and in time I came to understand its propensity to become both a remarkable new domain for learning as well as a perilously addictive environment. The first two programs I’d written, for literature students writing essays and for mechanical engineering students writing project reports, I worked on obsessively. I used old rolls of wallpaper to sketch out the shape of the programs and compose the text segments before coding them up in Guide.⁷ And of course those experiences were fused with literatures drawn from many sources – Arendt, Heidegger, Freire, Ihde, Castells, Latour, Suchmann, ACM 1980s hypertext conferences, compositional research from the CCC conferences in the USA.⁸ Just as the new domain of digital education required new methods of design (which involved, materially, going back beyond the book to the volumen – a lesson I never forgot) so research writing and reading also needed rethinking. I was working in a new trading zone in the research field – emergent, formational, intellectually-demanding, uncertain, with remarkable potentialities, and incredibly exciting.

The final section is called Regula and deals with regulation of legal education. Jill Harries points out in her insightful article on Roman legal education that regulation has always accompanied legal education, in one form or another, from ancient times.⁹ She contrasts the forms of regulation used in the republic to those of later imperial Rome.¹⁰ Replace imperial administration with the demands of our contemporary bureaucratised neo-liberal statist regulation of profession and its educations and we have a similar shift happening today. I argue for a relational turn in regulation, much as I’ve done elsewhere in this blog and in my writing, and for regulation to create the ground upon which that can happen.¹¹

It’s not unrealistic or fantasy regulation. At a time when in England the SRA has reverted to a Bar-Exam style of assessment for entry to the profession there are other much more imaginative and socially-constructive approaches to legal education and its assessment. Take a look at the Daniel Webster Honors Scholar programme as an example of a law school implementing regulatory change along relational lines – see here for an independent report on its longstanding success. Or from the other side of the glass, take the great work of CPLED regulators in their PREP programme. CPLED, originally formed out of the Canadian prairie law societies, Albert, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, joined later by the Barristers’ Society of Nova Scotia, have now been joined by the law societies of Nunavut and British Columbia. This is almost unheard of, that legal regulators in different nations, states or provinces come together in this way voluntarily to participate fully in a professional legal educational initiative.¹² The success of the programme is due not just to the competence framework upon which it rests, but upon the values of the educational design which reflect the collegiality and co-operation of the regulators themselves: a spiral curriculum, reflection, practice of good habits, collaborative working with peers, as well as with lawyers, professionalism as deeply relational – a legal humanism the lineaments of which stretch back beyond the Enlightenment, to republican Rome.¹³ The programme acknowledges in a very real sense the intimacies of learning, teaching and regulation, the strong bonds without which none of the three can succeed on their own. We need more such regulatory initiatives that encourage the ‘shared space’ of collaborative inquiry and joint action in legal education.

My thanks to Paulina Wilson for the invitation to participate in the Reflections on Teaching series, and to the rest of the team at NILQ for their assistance. It’s a super initiative, worth bookmarking for future contributions to the series.

1. Graham, W.S. (1999). The Nightfisherman. Selected Letters of W.S.Graham. Michael & Margaret Snow (eds). London, Carcanet. Letter to Ruth Hilton, 22 March 1967, p.210. ↩︎
2. Now we must try higher, aware of the terrible
   Shapes of silence sitting outside your ear
   Anxious to define you and really love you.
   Remember silence is curious about its opposite
   Element which you shall learn to represent.
   Graham, W.S. (2004). New Collected Poems, London, Faber, p.229. ↩︎
3. Also in this section is an outline of three different approaches to curricular design, which I’ve called episodic, systemic and complexity. ↩︎
4. My medieval literature tutor from the undergrad MA, Des O’Brien, had obtain Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) funding in 1989 for a computer lab, called STELLA (Software for the Teaching of English Literature & Language and its Assessment). He showed me his early work on William Langland’s Piers Plowman, passus XX, as a hypertext teaching resource for students, using Guide Hypermedia (see next footnote). I was astonished. I had read of computers but never used one before so this was the first time I encountered digital in any constructive sense. I worked within STELLA, with funding from Enterprise in Glasgow University, to learn how to code in Guide, and develop educational programs.
   
   It’s worth noting in passing that digital media were taken up early and enthusiastically by specialists in ancient languages – the Humanities in the Perseus Project, Anglo-Saxon in the Beowulf workstation, Des’s work on the Middle English of Piers Plowman, for example. Having learned Latin and Greek at school purely on terms of grammar, syntax and lexis as you do, it seemed a small step for me to learn high-level coding: there are parallels between the learning processes in both. I regret I didn’t go on to learn to read the cuneiform languages I encountered in a fascinating undergraduate course on Ancient Near Eastern History – Akkadian, Assyrian, for example – or go on to learn coding properly. ↩︎
5. Guide Hypermedia was a pre-internet hypertext application. Guide supported pop-ups for small annotations, and jumps, which appeared to me then like jump cuts. It’s worth reading the excellent Wikipedia entry on jump cuts because there are many uncanny parallels between the decisions that made between film editing and the decisions that hypertext writers have to make when linking hypertexts. For example, where time and timing is an essential element in the splicing of a jump cut, in creating the hypertext jump I had to consider what fragment of knowledge would be useful and at which particular point in the chronology of a reader’s reading of a text. And in many ways it paralleled the layers of commentary that are embedded within a glossed manuscript, and which I began to appreciate the more I worked with text and hypertext. ↩︎
6. There is a book to be written on the emergence of digital discourse and practices within legal education. This short piece in the NILQ was very much a personal view; but we need to understand our history, in order to understand what we do now and how we might change in the future. ↩︎
7. Working over 12 hours at a time and on too much coffee I hallucinated I was in an enchanted medieval garden, reaching up to take hypertexts that hung from the branches of trees. When I read about early digital gamers and the long passages they would spend at keyboard & screen I recognised the impulse. Later I would write about the many striking parallels between hypertextual and medieval reading and compositional practices. We have still to fully understand how the web and hypertext have affected the material cultures of scholarship in legal education, and how digital returns us to volumen and glossa, back beyond the print revolutions of the fifteenth century and later. ↩︎
8. ACM = Association for Computing Machinery. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Conference_on_Hypertext_and_Social_Media for a brief history. Their conference proceedings were a revelation to me of the new world of hypertext. ↩︎
9. Harries, J. (2016). Legal education and the training of lawyers. In du Plessis, P., Ando, C., Tuori, K. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society. Oxford Handbooks, Oxford, OUP, 162. ↩︎
10. For example the later imperial centralised control of a discourse vs the earlier much looser discursive diversity and distributed understanding of law; monolithic focus on content and knowledge vs cultural fusions across disciplines; elite vs public interests; power asymmetries in access and affordability; distinctions between iuris prudentes and court advocates, later morphing into distinctions between academic lawyers and practitioners in the profession. ↩︎
11. For example https://paulmaharg.com/2017/10/20/common-entrance-exams-and-the-sqe-the-wrong-story/ ; and Maharg, P. (2017). The Gordian knot: regulatory relationship and legal education. Asian Journal of Legal Education, 4, 2, 79-94. ↩︎
12. Honesty box – I was a consultant to the design of PREP, which I modelled on elements of the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice in Scotland that I worked on 1999-2010. ↩︎
13. See eg Adam Ferguson, in his unpublished lectures to students on moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh Library’s Special Collections, where he quotes Horace – ↩︎

Now is your time to begin Practices and lay the Foundation of habits that may be of use to you in every Condition and in every Profession at least that is founded on a literary or a Liberal Education. Sapere and Fari quae sentiat are the great Objects of Literary Education and of Study. […] mere knowledge however important is far from being the only or most important Attainment of Study.
The Habits of Justice, Candour, Benevolence, and a Courageous Spirit are the first Objects of Philosophy the Constituents of happiness and of personal honour, and the first Qualifications for human Society and for Active life