Shameless plug alert… I’m organising the next workshop in the SLS legal education workshops series, called ‘Simulated Clients: A workshop on interdisciplinary learning and teaching in legal education’. Friday 2 June, 0950-1600, in the Common Room of the Atkin Building, City Law School, City University, London. Here’s the flyer, and an extract from it:
The [used of simulated clients] challenges many aspects of our current theory and practice in legal education, including the following:
- Curriculum structures: the method leads us to re-design our conventional curriculum interventions.
- Ethics of the client encounter
- The cognitive poverty of much of conventional law school assessment
- Law school as a self-regarding, monolithic construct
- Law school categories of employment
- The curricular isolation of clinic within law schools
- Hollowed-out skills rhetoric
- Conventional forms of regulation by regulatory bodies
- The role of regulator, less as monitor/accreditor and more as encourager of innovation & reform.
- Disciplinary boundaries – SCs and educators can learn much from other interdisciplinary practices
- SCs reflect local jurisdictional practices – how might such a project work, globally?
This workshop will give you the opportunity to hear from a distinguished medical educator who has worked in the field of simulation as well as examples of practice from a range of jurisdictions. You will hear in detail the work of the Simulated Client Initiative (SCI), its global setting, and examples of SCs in use in a range of programmes. You will learn how to set up a SC project in your institution, how SCs interact with students, novice lawyers and can be used for lawyers’ continuous professional development, and how they can be used to develop a range of legal skills. You’ll learn how to sustain a community of SCs in your law school, how to create a research agenda around the heuristic, and much else.
We can accommodate around 30-35 participants. You can register here, and resources will be put up on a revived Simulated Client Initiative WordPress site in the next month. If there are many more registrants than 35, we’ll hold it again later in the year. I’ll be live blogging it on the day; and I’m also organising a sister event in ANU later in the year, possibly one later again, in Toronto.
Hope to see you in London!