These two conferences, within a week of each other, presented a number of interesting contrasts. The LSBU event focused on sims and games and consisting of keynotes short sessions and a core games & sim design session, was the more interactive; the HKU conference, more generally on experiential learning and innovation, was more conventional. I liked the interactivity, especially the game planning session and the presentations of the games to the rest of the conference. The small group work, doing nothing but trying out game designs according to templates given to us by Emily Allbon and adapted by the group, worked well. It was a reminder of how much can be achieved by small groups who put aside the rest of their lives for a time to get something designed and implemented. Sure, it was only a start; but it was a start, and made us think. What we needed was the Deweyan habit of doing it consistently, getting better at it, embedding it in our working lives. The trouble is finding the discipline and the time to do that when our lives are filled with admin, conventional teaching, research deadlines. Creative time, so valuable to design, easily slips down the priority list unless there’s a community that sustains it. In other words, we need systemic change to take forward the workshop. In the plenary at the end I think that that was discussed.
Theory didn’t feature much in the LSBU event. Which is not to say that there was a lack of theory-discussion; but that was more tentative and left to individuals to reference and construct – rightly so, because the literatures on sims and games are multi-disciplinary and complex. But if CLEO were to think of a follow up, it might be useful to have a theory + implementations workshop where some base theories are read, discussed and explored, and put into practice by considering a range of games & sims. In a sense that was what Sara de Freitas and I attempted in our book, Digital Games and Learning, where the book’s sections are entitled Theoria, Cultura, and Praxis, with chapters on the theory, cultures and practical implementations of games and explorations of how the three intersect. And it’s certainly what I tried to do in Transforming Legal Education. In the next couple of weeks at Osgoode I’ll be starting a training the trainers course for our Sim Client programme – it’ll be intense, and include theory, practice and activities.
The HKU conference had more conventional sessions – keynotes, short presentations and a panel session. There was some interesting use of theory but the focus tended to be on implementations. There was maybe too much description of context compared to analysis, and almost no longitudinal work done on implementations – nothing new in legal ed conferences. On the other hand the sense of palpable experimentation and the sheer variety of innovation was exciting to hear. The final panel session on paper looked like it might have turned out to be like so many of those panel sessions encountered at US legal ed conferences, with deans and directors droning on at a height of 35,000 feet about their law school pet projects, and little chance for anyone to ask critical questions. Actually it was the very opposite: it was engaging and intellectually exciting because the focus was on innovation in other disciplines, with plenty of detail of practice from which one could deduce the theory involved. The constant (and unstated) parallel was always there as a What If – what if we did that in legal education – what would it look like? And there was an added paradox in that all this newness was coming from one institution, HKU. It was a great way to end a conference that celebrated 50 years of education in the law at HKU, because it pointed to ways we could begin to imagine systemic curriculum innovation in the next 50 years.
System and curriculum – at the macro-level, that’s where the most powerful changes will take place in the future. Individual, subject-based innovation is useful, but we really need to see some of the huge numbers of pilot projects and individual efforts scaled up and organised within a curriculum, ideally under some organising notions of learning. As I said back in 2007, in the SIMPLE Final Report, curriculum is technology. It’s a toolset by which we organise and help bring about learning. Like a joiner’s toolbox it is full of tools ancient and contemporary. Work out the designs and we’ll know which tools to use to achieve them. It’s back to the architectural salon model of learning. Listening to my son Euan describe his education in Landscape Architecture in Edinburgh College of Art, I realised how much of that visual seeing we needed to import into legal education, and how much of it is exploration of a new way of seeing law and justice – something I discuss in this blog post.
Did these two conferences give us ideas? Yes – a surfeit of them. Here are three that came to mind as I listened to speakers:
- We could imagine a problem-based learning curriculum – that’s not so hard, given the work of Newcastle Law School (NSW), Maastricht U Law School, York U Law School (England) and ANU’s online PBL JD.
- Or we could more speculatively imagine a legal design curriculum based upon interdisciplinary work, incorporating digital technologies as design components – combining the work, for example, of Margaret Hagan, Emily Allbon and Brian Tang, and the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (Osgoode is a founding member).
- Or imagine a curriculum comprising largely of PBL-based sims and games, where the concept of a sim & game theory is taught in depth in a foundation year, the programme describing a great, rising spiral curriculum of increasing complexity and interdisciplinary, and where student agency is increased by allowing them to undertake the open range of subjects of the type that CS Lau described on the HKU medical degree.
All three are possible. None depend on preparing students for the legal profession specifically, though all could easily incorporate the concept of preparation for a professional life, and a life of service to democratic values. All would treat the purpose of legal education as something other than arid professional mimicry, or a sterile liberal higher education. All would acknowledge the rich interdisciplinarity of higher education, where law is one among peers drawing its legitimacy and discourse from its peers, much as the study of literature, to take one example of an Arts discipline, draws upon rhetoric, sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, feminist & race discourses, critical historiography, bibliographical studies, fine arts and many others to define itself as a supple, ever-changing discipline.
Above all, these three alternatives would imagine a much greater freedom for students. I’ve said often before on this blog we should re-consider the sophisticated status of students in the early eleventh century, where they exercised much more power over their studies and lives as students. The original university, in the north and west, was created by students for students. But there is little systemic movement to empower students in this way. Under the Scottish system of QAA students are an important part of the systemic review of institutions, but they still do not lead in-depth on subjects (such as is described by Milles et al 2019, where students function as module co-directors);[1] nor do they have power at senior management levels. Only in times of crisis, such as that facing students protesting on the streets in Hong Kong, does their power (and courage in taking critical democratic values onto the streets) become apparent.[2]
I hope there’s some sort of publication comes out of the conferences, either a summary or a proceedings. They were too valuable to disappear, but all too often that’s what happens to legal educational conferences and workshops. In the UK we never really got round to replacing UKCLE’s valuable function. In legal education there’s still no central record in any jurisdiction that I know of, where we collect our publications, gather what we speak about, note and observe what we plan. We’re as amnesiac as we ever were about recording our own past. Surely we must do something about that?
My thanks to Andy Unger, Dawn Watkins and Emily Allbon for the invitation to the LSBU London conference, and to Wilson Chow and the rest of his conference committee for the invitation to HKU conference. Both were super events. I loved being part of them, and talking with people who had such a range of inventive, imaginative plans for legal education. I hope it’s not too much to say that there can be a spiritual element that attends such events: they are a form of pilgrimage, a temporary heaven on earth where we see glimpses of how we can be other, different, and do better things for our students and society than we have done to date. Michael McGhee and I planned something like that for our week-long intense living-and-working convivium on Papay. The best conferences can be transfigurations.
Next week, back in Canada, it’s the CALE (Canadian Assoc for Legal Ethics) conference, this year being held in Windsor Law, Hamilton, Ontario, where I’ll be talking about some of the ethical aspects of the use of sim clients by law schools and regulators. Onwards, westward, northward…
- [1]Milles, L.S., Hitzblech, T., Drees, S., Wiebke, W., Arends, P., Peters, H. (2019). Student engagement in medical education: A mixed-method study on medical students as module co-directors in curriculum development. Media al Teacher, 41, 10, 1143-1150. The authors summarise the article in Practice Points:
– Students as module co-directors represent a feasible and effective model of student engagement in curriculum engagement.
– The students bring in broad and unique knowledge on their curriculum and contribute complementarily to its improvement
– The model builds on high autonomy of students in organising their work individually and as a group.
– Their work benefits both the students and the institution.↩ - [2]As a Visiting Professor at another university in Hong Kong, namely the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), my attention was drawn to one such crisis. The current ongoing confrontations between students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Vice-Chancellor, Rocky Tuan, are described in this article in the South China Morning Post. More recently, Tuan’s open letter and his meeting with students are described here. Note that the Chancellor of CUHK is the Chief Executive of Hong Kong – currently one Carrie Lam… Lawyers in Hong Kong have staged their own protests against political prosecutions – see this article in the Hong Kong Free Press. More recently, Hong Kongers have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.↩