First of all apologies to all three of my readers who have got in touch to ask if I had departed this world or worse stopped blogging. It’s been an unconscionable time, but I’m still hanging in there. Been mega-busy with projects at Osgoode and my new role at Newcastle University Law School, and elsewhere more of which anon, and I know that’s no excuse to give up posting but it was that or burnout… Meantime I thought I’d let you know about the three latest volumes in the ELE series, co-edited with my wonderful colleagues Beth Mertz and Meera Deo, and our Routledge editor, Siobhan Poole. and the latest two in Digital Games, Simulations and Learning, co-edited with the excellent Sara de Freitas. I urge you to rush out and panic-buy all five, for who knows how long our law schools will effectively be closed, and you’ll need something other than Netflix, marking and next year’s online course prep to keep you amused/sane at home.
First up, Rachael Field (Bond University Law School) and Caroline Strevens (University of Portsmouth Law Dept), Educating for Well-Being in Law: Positive Professional Identities and Practice. It’s an edited collection, as all three are, focusing as the title suggests on well-being, and thus complements ELE’s earlier volume on this, by Field, Duffy & James (FDJ). Why two volumes on the same topic, in one series? Because they’re not the same topic at all. Where FDJ grew out of the work of Field and her colleagues in the well-being networks across law schools and the legal profession in Australia, this volume spans two very different jurisdictions. The range of reference is extraordinary, as is discussion of theory and practice. If you’re at all interested in well-being in legal education, and who can’t be, then this volume is for you. As the blurb says, ‘Asking and answering the question as to whether law is special in terms of producing psychological distress in law students, law teachers and the profession, and bringing together common and opposing perspectives, this book also seeks to highlight excellent practice in promoting a positive professional identity at law school and beyond.’ Good to see my ANU colleagues Vivien Holmes, Anneka Ferguson and others in the book. The inter-jurisdictional team-ups are especially fascinating – eg Barry Yau & David Catanzariti (ANU) with Joanne Atkinson (Portsmouth), and Margaret Castles (Adelaide) with Carole Boothby (Northumbria). Legal centres in the UK feature too, eg the work of Lydia Bleasdale and Sarah Humphreys in CIRLE. And of course any book that has Nigel Duncan contributing to two chapters has got to be good value…
Next, Imperatives for Legal Education Research. Then, Now and Tomorrow. It’s edited by Ben Golder, Marina Nehme, Alex Steel and Prue Vines all from UNSW, and is based on a conference held there in December 2017. I gave one of the keynotes and was really impressed by the range and quality of research that was presented at the conference sessions. I blogged those that I attended – see final wrap-up post. The book is a selection of keynotes and parallel papers, and gives interesting perspectives on a range of legal educational research issues. The title is uncompromising – imperatives – but it’s hard not to agree with most of the chapters which point out how we can improve our research.
In my own chapter I describe how at one level in our research we do the same things over and over (Sisyphus) or at another we reach for max originality (Prometheus) and thus ignore those practices that are essential for our discipline, namely the careful tending of our history, our research cultures and communities. As we pointed out in LETR for example (more on that in a moment) there is little co-ordination of research initiatives between academy and regulators on a sustained basis. There is little organisation by the academy of the increasing volume of research that it produces on legal education: a significant lack of longitudinal studies, very few ongoing and sustained data studies, no meta-reviews, almost no systematic reviews of literature, almost no policy paper series, little in the way of a stream of historical literature on legal education that feeds into current developments and future innovation. I iconised this approach in the subtle figure of the Titan, Themis (also by some accounts mother of Prometheus). Such lack of organisation and the thin historical awareness that it gives rise to, I argue, constitutes a bar to the development of a rich legal educational research paradigm, and seriously affects our ability to generate, curate and argue from evidence-based data. As I say in the final paragraph,
Themis thus represents an impulse to order that is for the good of the community, for order of any kind is impossible without memory and without histories and the interpretive, reflexive turn that such narratives bring – qualities that, as we saw in the field of our historyless techne, are urgently required. Themis brings to our research, too, the resonance of communitarian values, and a belief that by organizing our past work we may be able to better understand the present, and gaze further into the future.
Interestingly, two contrasting examples of this popped up in the last few days. Our developer from LETR, Gavin Maxwell, let me know that hosting on the LETR site was about to finish and it would go down. Gavin and I took a copy and posted the entire site at the tab above to rescue it. Over two years of work by Julian Webb, Jane Ching, Avrom Sherr and myself and many others would have disappeared from the web had we not done so. The SRA have been informed and we’re working with them to conserve the data more securely. The second example appeared on Twitter, via the estimable David Thomson from Sturm Law School, U of Denver, retweeting Evan Parker’s article that uses LSSSE data to answer the question ‘What is an excellent legal education?’ (full article up on Legal Evolution). While I disagree with his final conclusion, his article is full of data-rich pointers to how we can enhance our students’ learning in the midst of a pandemic. So on the one hand we have a major national legal education project, maybe 400mb of data, about to disappear from the web, and on the other, the use of archived, curated, analysed longitudinal data sets across 15 years to give us insights into how we can manage our present and future directions. LSSSE and Parker’s article are the perfect example of a Themistic approach to legal education.
Finally, a book I’ve been longing to see in the series: Power, Legal Education and Law School Cultures, edited by Meera Deo (Thomas Jefferson Law School, San Diego – also Director of LSSSE), Mindie Lazarus-Black (Temple U, Professor Emerita, Anthropology) and Elizabeth Mertz (Wisconsin Law School & ABA Foundation). The book questions the myths of neutralities and meritocracies in law schools ‘from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education.’ Chapters focus on gender, race, class and market and most are based on empirical research. I especially liked Rachel Vanneuville’s ‘Legal training as socialization to state power: An ethnography of law classes for French senior civil servants’, while the title of Mindie Lazarus-Black’s chapter, ‘Teaching international lawyers how to think, speak, and act like US lawyers: Notes on inchoate power and the imperial process’ says much about the force and direction of the volume.
We need more books like this one that challenge the status quo of our law schools, now more than ever in the serious disruptions we face in organising our schools for next year and beyond. For as a number of commentators point out, while Covid-19 presents us with some new issues of organisation, most of the problems of the ‘new normal’ are actually the problems of the old normal, just revealed as now urgently in need of transformation. As two commentators put it, the ‘”new normal” of a post-COVID world looks surprisingly like the world we already knew was necessary.’
In the series I co-edit with Sara de Freitas, Digital Games, Simulations and Learning, we’ve published an excellent empirical account of virtual reality: Virtual Reality in Curriculum and Pedagogy: Evidence from Secondary Classrooms by Erica Southgate (School of Education, Newcastle University, Australia). Very interesting data on the VR School Project, with lots of parallels to university education. Kent Bye, a journalist who is influential in the field of AI, VR & AR, wrote up the book in an insightful podcast on Voices of VR – worth a listen.
Books – they’re like buses. On the same day we also published Sylvester Arnab’s book, Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces. Sylvester (Disruptive Media Learning Lab, Coventry U, UK) has been working on the book for a while, but his timing couldn’t have been better, in the midst of the pandemic. For as the blurb has it, the book ‘delves into the concept, opportunities, and challenges of hybrid learning, which aims to reduce the barriers of time and physical space in teaching and learning practices, fostering seamless, sustained, and measurable learning experience and outcomes beyond the barriers of formal education and physical learning contexts.’
Interesting that the two books in DGSL are single author accounts of learning with education and technology, while the three books in ELE are edited collections of multi-authored chapters. What it says about the status of the two fields I’m not sure; but I’d like to see more single-author monographs in ELE and more edited collections in DGSL. Oh and finally, while we’re on the subject of virtuality and games, you might want to look at the Open Library Pressbooks title, Using Game-Based Learning Online – A Cookbook of Recipes, which is a super collection of ideas, stimulations and provocations, all free and for your delectatioun and delite.