Holding a mirror up to nature

Rather belatedly I have caught up with a discussion over at Richard Moorhead’s Lawyer watch blog, in which Richard looks at the College of Law’s new two year LLB and questions the extent to which it is likely to be as different from other LLBs as it claims to be. A critical point in Richard’s argument is that

The real, intellectual difference between the College’s approach and the traditional law school’s approach is most likely between the College’s emphasis on teaching students in the practical utility of law. In the College this is likely to lead to solid practical teaching of solid practical legal skills in determinedly practical contexts. A bit of this is a good thing.  In fact, problem based learning is well established in some undergraduate curricula already.  But to concentrate on this to the exlcusion of everything else?  That gives me concerns.  Students are likely to be well trained in a mechanistic way but will they be inspired?  Will they understand the broader picture? Will they develop critical thinking skills?  The key thing that an excellent University education provides beyond the basics is those moments of inspiration, where the student’s world view may be genuinely transformed.

This post generated a number of interesting responses, including a thoughtful post from the College’s Scott Slorach. Amongst a range of points, Scott takes on Richard’s concern that the College will not address the ‘broader picture’, as follows:  

The broader picture is the understanding of the practical, contemporary contexts in which legal principles are applied in order to facilitate transactions, assert rights, allocate risk, seek remedies, govern businesses, define relationships, and so on. Providing this broader picture of the interests of individuals and businesses, and how practising lawyers use the law to maintain, develop and protect these interests is paramount to a deep understanding. I agree with you entirely that an excellent education should be one which provides the “spark [which] is necessary for life-long learning, commitment to professional ideals and to produce the truly exceptional individuals who can cope with transformative change. It is also necessary for the quality of university as a life experience.” I believe that providing students with the aforementioned broader picture will create an environment where the sparks will be in the form of “Now I see why…”, “So that’s how you can…”, etc. That is, understanding not only what the law is, and why the law is as it is, but, most importantly, how it can be used practically for the benefit of individuals and businesses. It is this latter relevance which can provide understanding and continued motivation to learn from the start.

Now we could, of course, just mutter that there is room for many approaches and respect the virtues of a thousand flowers blooming and leave it at that, but I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something fundamentally a bit troubling about Scott’s response.

I agree absolutely that degree level education needs to address the various dimensions of “what”, “how” and “why”, but I am concerned that what Scott offers is (i) not necessarily a “broader picture” – though it may be different from what many law schools currently offer - and (ii) both (as that paragraph demonstrates) an elision of the how and the why, and a prioritisation of a particular how that may be ethically troubling. If we present law in a primarily vocational setting that emphasises the ‘use of law for the benefit of individuals and businesses’ that seems to fit rather well with the utilitarian ethos of the times. It is pragmatic in a way that may well attract students focused on their future job prospects, though they may not actually have a great grasp of what will best equip them for the marketplace, and it may be moot whether any law degree presently fits that bill (which is, of course, one of the questions LETR is looking at). But is it what our students, and society, actually need a higher legal education to be?

At the risk of over-simplifying the issues, I worry that Scott risks prioritising a hired gun model of lawyering, by narrowing students’ understanding of the social context in which law operates to the horizon of the prospective client. Doesn’t a deeper and broader understanding of context require a grasp of the wider social functions and moral ambitions of law, and doesn’t the examination of that require some commitment among teachers of law to understanding and researching ‘law in action’ (a wider concept than law in practice?) and, dare I say it, a philosophy of both law and education, not just training? Law degrees probably should engage with the practice of law more, and I absolutely agree that understanding ‘why’ in a practical context can be a really useful trigger. But its not the only one. A wider understanding of the social context enables us to shine a critical light on, not just hold a mirror up to nature. And isn’t that the way it should be?   

 

Creativity and assessment

With the demise of UKCLE, I have got drawn into a bit more teaching this term than in recent years – even with the buyout for LETR. And I have to say I’m really enjoying it, I’ve got a nice mix of undergraduate legal theory, postgrad teaching on a module we call Foundations of Socio-Legal Theory and Research, and a joint Law and Business module – Critical Issues in Law and Management (CILM) – that my colleague Grier Palmer (Warwick Business School) has developed. CILM is one of those great modules where content in a way comes second to process. It is primarily a vehicle for developing creativity and critical thinking, and so we use a lot of student-centred activity and presentation work, a bit of open-space learning, and assess through an essay, book review, and a set of reflective logs. Its quite experimental for both the students and those of us teachng on it!

One of our experiments this year, which is linked to a larger project on case-based learning that Grier and I are involved in for Warwick’s Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (with colleagues from education, health, and the Medical School), has been to create a case study around the notorious Bhopal gas tragedy. Twenty-seven years after the original explosion at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, this is still having a massive impact on the lives of its victims  As a case study it is a massively rich and powerful teaching resource. There are lots of primary and secondary materials available, and it provides a good vehcle for exploring a range of related legal, business and human rights issues.

We decided to run the Bhopal case as a student-led activity – we have a group of 10 CILM students who take the course as a 30 credit module, rather than the usual 24. So, their ’6 CATS project’ this year was to lead the rest of the class in preparing to stage and then staging a Peoples’ Tribunal hearing on the continuing impact of the Bhopal tragedy. This work was spread over four weeks and integrated into the class time, starting with a briefing session for the 30 CATS students  in week 1, followed by a ‘book review’ session for the whole class – discussing and critically analysing a range of academic literature on the Bhopal tragedy. That in turn was followed in week 3 by a student-led session in which the 30 CATS team briefed and worked with their 24 credit peers on planning the tribunal. The tribunal itself was then held in week 4, over a two hour teaching slot.

We haven’t yet seen the 30 CATS students reflective pieces on this activity, but my initial sense is that it was reasonably successful, and something I would like to further develop. One of the great things about it was that, with a cohort of around 50 students on the module, we had two iterations of both the planning session and the Tribunal itself. This really gave the 30 CATS students an opportunity to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t, and to take action almost immediately to implement change. This worked really well in the planning session, so that the second was noticeably more structured, better managed and more dynamic – a great example of how students can really very quickly learn from experience. Interestingly, though the 30 CATS students are assessed on the whole process, not just the Tribunal, a lot of the assessment anxiety clearly homed in around the tribunal performance itself. One manifestation of this was that, though there was some really great content, the event was closely scripted and lacked a bit of the dynamism and creativity we were hoping to see. This isn’t meant as a criticism of the students; they could see it for themselves, and it one point in the second iteration, they ‘let go’ of the script and engaged in a bit of improvisation, and in that moment brought a wholly different energy to the activity .

For me it raises some interesting challenges. The assessment context clearly had a chilling effect and encouraged the students who were being assessed to play it a bit safe, even though that involved an element of discrepant reasoning, since they also knew that creativity was something they would get credit for. As a teacher, I want to maximise the opportunities for my students to think and act ‘outside of the box’, and to get credit for it; I don’t want to marginalise creativity by treating it as unassessable. I I therefore want to create a  space for enabling and encouraging risk-taking, and now I’m wondering whether that needs to be constructed as somewhere safe, or maybe it does need to be slightly edgy? I also want to get inside and disrupt that kind of intuitive cost-benefit thinking which drives them to play safe, and, I suspect, is ingrained by years of traditional assessment practices. I can already see that we may have left a gap between creativity and risk-taking, both conceptually and in terms of getting the message across about what we were looking for from this asssessment. So, a bit of work to be done!

 

Islamic Law SIG @ UKCLE

Hosted our last ever event today under the HEA-UKCLE banner, a rather poignant moment after 12 years of supporting learning and teaching law. I’m pleased to say it was a good event to share with our community, particularly on a topic of growing importance. The main event was a presentation by Professor Mashood Baderin of SOAS looking at the teaching and learning of Islamic Law in UK universities. It was an immensely engaging and quite provocative presentation that sought to deal with both conceptual and practical aspects of building an Islamic Law curriculum in the UK. Mashood’s core contention was the need to treat Islamic Law as ‘Law properly so-called’ rather than ‘a different kind of law’ or even as a marginalised or inferior subject of comparative analysis. This would require us to take, he suggested, in Western jurisprudential terms, a positivist and realist perspective on Islamic Law (and note, Islamic Law, not just Islamic jurisprudence). The presentation also emphasised the need for UK legal education to provide more than a general introduction to or education in Islamic Law, but to develop a cadre of ‘home-trained’ lawyers with a good knowledge and understanding of Islamic Law. This would require us to go beyond a kind of ‘hot topics’ approach to the subject – what Robert Gleave has criticised as a “service industry” approach to Islamic Studies moregenerally – to developing something more sustained and fundamental. To this end Mashood shared his thoughts on what a four-year combined honours degree in Common Law and Islamic Law could look like. Needless to say, a lively discussion followed which ranged across issues of pluralism and the secularisation of Islam (and whether we should perhaps be talking about Muslim rather than Islamic Law as a way of acknowledging the place and function of the state), of traditional and modern approaches to teaching Islamic Law and legal methods, and discussion of appropriate sources.

The issue of sources led us neatly into the second presentation of the day, by Jonathan Ercanbrack (also SOAS) explaining what was happening on the UKCLE-funded Law of Islamic Finance Bibliography Project. Jonathan’s presentation took us through some of the particular resource problems for Islamic Law studies and the limitations of conventional bibliographies and bibliographic tools. This project by contrast, is developing what will ultimately be a public resource, using the new multi-lingual functionality being built-in to the web-based (open source) Zotero bibliographic application. Speaking personally, Zotero has rapidly become my app of choice for building my own reference libraries, and it was great to see it’s functionality being used in this way.

Finally, we had a group discussion about the next steps for this Special Interest Group, post-UKCLE. It was encouraging to see the level of support from colleagues, and I feel confident that we have created something that will have an independent future. Plans for a steering group are being put in place, and hopefully a conference in 2012. Watch this space!

Legal Education & Training Review

Following the public announcement early last month, word is gradually getting around that the “UKCLE Research Consortium” will be undertaking the research for the regulator-funded review of legal education and training that is taking place in England and Wales. Needless to say I’m very excited to be involved in what is being billed as the largest review since the 1971 Ormrod Report – and also very aware of the challenges of such a complex project.

No doubt that it is going to be a big job. Our remit is to look at the changes that are shaping the legal services market in the wake of the Legal Services Act 2007, and assess their implications for future legal education and training needs. We are currently still involved in a lot of the planning and ‘backroom’ stuff that a project on this scale requires, but we are aiming to start research ‘proper’ in July. We are scheduled to complete the whole project in November 2012. A lot of the research will involve traditional empirical analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, but we are also planning to make extensive use of technology to support and open up the project. There will be a dedicated website, which, as a research team, we want to use as a tool to encourage participation and engagement with what we’re doing. I hope we can make it a different, more inclusive way of doing a review, which given both the consumer dimension, and the importance of the equality and diversity agenda, is important.

We have a top-flight team of researchers engaged in the project – Avrom Sherr (IALS, London), Paul Maharg (Northumbria), and Jane Ching (NTU – pictured here with me, Dame Janet Gaymer and Sir Mark Potter, the Co-Chairs of the Review Consultation Steering Panel), are the other institutional leads. We also have Chris Decker (Oxford Regulatory Policy Institute & CSLS), Rob Wilson (Warwick Institute for Employment Research) and the incomparable Richard Susskind as consultants. I’m sure there will be those who don’t think we are quite the right people for the job. I hear murmurs already from some in the profession that we are too academic, and from some academics that we are too close to the profession! Maybe that level of contradiction at least indicates that we are what we’re supposed to be: independent.

Back to the (Academic) Future

UKCLE recently ‘premiered’ its film on the future(s) of legal education at our Learning in Law Annual Conference in January. The premiere was certainly popular enough to generate a good turn out at the end of a longish day, and was followed by a lively plenary discussion the next morning. I’ve also shown the film as part of the Law Teachers’ Programme on the LLM at University College, London. I think it says some useful and sometimes quite contradictory things about where (English/UK) legal education is and ought to be going. It also touches, quite frequently, on the values that (might) underpin the practice. I’d be interested to get a debate going here, so: what do you think…?

UKCLE_Master_Final

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‘Disruptive’ students – some practical points

1. Include course and behaviour norms and expectations for students and teachers in course and module handbooks. This is obviously easier to achieve if staff are prepared to agree AND ENFORCE a consistent ‘policy’ across a programme or department. Potentially disruptive students may play on mixed and inconsistent messages.
2. Discuss these norms and expectations with students at induction and/or the start of modules. Share control and responsibility with them, obtaining agreement about the norms for classroom behaviour. If they have additional suggestions/norms, discuss them, and, if agreed add them to your list. This list could form part of a formal learning contract.
3. Use role modelling and ‘impression management’ – eg, if you don’t want students to be late and under-prepared, be on time and well-prepared yourself. Dressing and acting ‘professionally’ can be used to reinforce status and behaviour norms – if desired, though this may appear to emphasise the power disparities that exist in the classroom.
4. Prevention is easier than cure: detachment and boredom are significant causes of disruptive behaviour. Consider building greater variation of learning styles and a wider range of activities into learning and teaching, in an attempt to engage all students.
5. If disruptive behaviour does occur, see if you can change what you are doing – eg, divide students into groups for some work, or create an activity. Get the disruptive students to take some responsibility for how the class goes – eg to act as rapporteurs or lead discussion.
6. Don’t ignore continuing disruption, deal with it firmly but calmly when it arises. Don’t take it personally, and don’t make it personal.
7. Unless you have concerns about your personal security or safety, don’t walk out on a class, you will still shave to go back and deal with the problem next time
8. Speak to disruptive students outside of class. Explain why you find them disruptive, try to find out why they are acting that way, ask them what they would prefer to be doing. See if you can agree a way forward together.
9. Disruption that constitutes bullying or victimization of a faculty member or student is unacceptable in any circumstances and should be addressed as a disciplinary matter.

‘Disruptive’ university students – causes and cures?

Non-academics tend to be surprised when they hear university teachers complaining about a growing number of ‘disruptive’ students. “Surely not”, they exclaim, “these are people who choose to be there, and are paying for the privilege, why would they want to disrupt classes?” A good question. I’m not sure just how new or widespread a phenomenon it is, but it is one that seems to have generated, in recent years, a growing number of comments in the academic trade press, and teaching guides. Certainly many US universities seem to have developed formal policies on dealing with disruptive students – though (outside of library policies specifically) that still seems much less common in the UK. At UKCLE we have received a few questions about how law schools should deal with the problem. It was one of these that prompted me to put some thoughts together, first as a response to the specific enquiry, and now for hEaD space.

The first step is to think about what actually constitutes disruption, and what is causing the behaviour. Studies on disruptive behaviour in schools indicate, not surprisingly, that it can be both student and teacher-induced. I suspect, in HE, quite a lot may also be influenced by the fact that students are exposed, often quite abruptly and with limited support, to what is, for some, an alien learning environment. A lot of low-level disruption is likely to reflect either a genuine lack of awareness of expected behavioural norms, or sometimes an expression of frustration at, or sometimes a feeling of alienation or inadequacy in that environment. Viewed in this way, quite a lot of ‘disruptive’ behaviour probably shouldn’t be labelled as such. In my view real disruption involves intentional behaviour that significantly and ongoingly interferes with the learning experience of other students. Defined in that way, I suggest, it focuses our attention on practices involving active non-engagement in or interference with learning activities, such as routinely and deliberately talking over the tutor or other students, repeated mobile phone use, hectoring or bullying of other students, and/or the teacher. The more extreme forms of such behaviour, rightly, become a disciplinary issue, but the lesser forms, and even unintentional ‘disruption’ can also have a serious impact on the learning environment and need to be addressed appropriately.

Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton in their book When Hope and Fear Collide (1998) looked at US college students’ attitudes and behaviours in the 1990’s. They interviewed 9200 students, 270 Student Affairs Officer and did focus group interviews at 28 campuses across the US. Despite its US provenance, I think it has resonances for the UK. One of their key points is that there is a significant mismatch between teachers’ teaching style and students’ learning style. While students tend to like learning that has structure and direction, involving concrete, practical, experiences and exemplars, faculty often prefer learning that moves from the global (‘general principles’, or the ‘big picture’) to the particular, involves a relatively high level of abstraction and theory, and, often the deployment of only lightly directed, or ‘discovery’ forms of learning.

My point here is not that either approach is right or wrong, rather, it is that the mismatch itself can generate a loss of respect and frustration for both sides in the relationship, and trigger patterns of ‘disruptive’ behaviour. This suggests that at least part of the solution may lie in properly addressing the difference in expectations. In the next post I’ll explore some tried and tested strategies that can help deal with the problem.

The future of legal education – part 2: gazing in the crystal ball

So, where do my musings, based on the previous post, lead me? Let’s start with the biggest change. I anticipate that we will see the gap between elite and local institutions widening, with a greater degree of mission and market differention than at present. By 2029, what we might think of as the modern ‘compleat university’ will I think be the preserve of a few elite institutions.Why?

First, I think it will be recognised that the demand for graduate employment has been misjudged and that the HE sector has become bloated (in crude economic terms, and, sadly those seem to be what counts), particularly in its ‘production’ of social sciences and humanities graduates. In law, whether we like it or not, changes to the market for legal services, which are already having profound affects on the shape of the legal profession, will have an impact on legal education, and not just in terms of demand for and design of vocational training. We reckon that, today, somewhere between 30-40% of law graduates in England and Wales actually enter the profession, though about 60-70% of them probably still want a career in law. One particularly important facet of this changing environment will be the impact of alternative business structures, increased legal process outsourcing and other forms of de-professionalisation on legal education and training. Even putting the recession to one side, we will, I think, see a further reduction in the number of traditionally qualified lawyers and a significant increase in paralegal work. Even if we do not regard professional education as the primary function of academic legal education, there are plenty of our students who do, and there will be a growing disjunction between their aspirations and the reality of the marketplace. That could start to have an impact on recruitment, and almost certainly will have an impact on what universities, and particularly the ‘recruiting’ as opposed to ‘selecting’ universities, need to do to address the employability of their students.

Secondly, resource, technology and sustainability factors will combine to influence how and where people study. The emphasis on work-based and workplace learning will increase, and the epistemological gaps between academic, social and technical/vocational knowledge will continue to be eroded. Traditional, full-time f2f, tuition may become increasingly outmoded and outpriced as technological enhancements improve, and constraints on mobility increase (due to fuel poverty and/or environmental protection policies), or it may simply become, once again, the preserve of an economic elite. Distance and technology-enhanced learning will become much more the norm, and learning will also become separated from processes of assessment and certification, with some universities becoming primarily assessment and certification hubs for learning that is undertaken through a distributed network of local and workplace centres.

It follows also that we may see fundamental and continuing change to the academic role. If we have fewer ‘compleat’ universities, we will probably have fewer ‘compleat’ academics. We can expect, perhaps, a greater premium on the effective delivery of learning and teaching, especially in those institutions that become more exclusively teaching-led, but also more generally as funding becomes tied more closely to teaching quality evaluations. At the same time, in most disciplines – even law – as successive research impact assessments re-define what counts as appropriate research activity, campus-based research will give way to more flexible approaches. These will increasingly utilise independent research facilities and groupings, often funded directly by the commercial and state sectors. In short, research and teaching functions will become disaggregated, work may become more casualised and competition for ‘traditional’ academic posts will be greatly increased.

For most of us, this probably looks like a pretty dystopian future, despite some glimmers of light in terms of what could be achieved, eg, in terms of widening participation and educational innovation in a more flexible environment. UK universities, including their law schools, have been, for the most part, a success story, and that is not alway an easy position from which to anticipate the need for change. Rather like Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas, I am not here to tell you what will come to pass, merely what might be, if we don’t start to anticipate the need for deep change in both organizational and sustainability terms, and provide leadership (at all levels) accordingly:

“Lead on!” said Scrooge. “Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know.”

The future of legal education – Part 1: the drivers for change

As I mentioned in the last post, I was in Keele at the beginning of last week for the first two days of the Centenary Conference of the Society of Legal Scholars. It was a good event – a high quality Practice, Profession and Ethics section meeting organised by Hilary Sommerlad, and socially too an excellent conference.

I was invited by Fiona Cownie to be part of a plenary panel on the future of legal education. It was quite a lively event, which generated a lot of questions. I’m unlikely to publish my presentation elsewhere, so I thought I might as well summarise it here – and develop a couple of the points that I left underdeveloped in the ten minutes I had available.

The brief we were given was to consider where we thought legal education would be in 20 years time – 2029. Not an easy brief at all! If we look back at the last 20 years, the changes have been substantial – in the UK we have moved from an elite to a (more or less) mass system of education; we have generated a substantial expansion of academic postgraduate education, experienced the creation of an audit-led research culture, and, in England and Wales particularly, seen a significant relaxation in professional control of the undergraduate law curriculum. Over that same time I think the basic level of teacher competence has improved, though whether there has been a commensurable increase in the quality of the student learning experience as a whole is much more moot, not least because of the research focus created by the RAE.

In this post I’ll focus briefly on what I see as the key drivers for future change, in the next I’ll say where they lead me.

Economy: we are receiving significantly different readings of the economic tealeaves – from those who suggest we are already starting the climb out of recession, to others who say that the worst is still to come, and that it could be another two to three years before we see a return to growth. There is no doubt that the recession will have a direct and probably sustained impact on HE spending for some years to come (HEFCE has already been required to excise £189 M from its 2010-11 spending). Ongoing changes in the financing of tertiary education may make HE less affordable and so potentially reduce access. It is likely that government will increasingly expect the sector to fund widening participation from fee income. It seems likely too that demand for traditional LLM courses has plateaued. Legal education will also be impacted by continuing changes in the professional services market – segmentation and casualisation of the market, hastened by the emergence of alternative business structures, will almost certainly help exacerbate existing status distinctions between educational providers at both academic and vocational stages.

Environment: we need to think of climate change as the one issue that has the potential to impact everything we do. As Prof Tom Burke has observed – “It is a systemic problem – it is one that touches all the others. It will stress all the other stresses in the world. We cannot look at it in a silo… All the pillars of prosperity are being undermined.” Most experts agree we are reaching a tipping point; the longer we leave it to initiate deep change, the more radical the surgery will need to be, the less likely that market mechanisms will be sufficient. On balance I am not one of the optimists, here. Climate change will, I suspect, demand some radical interventions. Fuel poverty will become a growing global problem; economic and, indeed, legal constraints on mobility will become more common; we may by the early 2020s see a return to greater protectionism/state corporatism as the environmental crisis places an increased strain on existing regional and global institutions.

Demography: Concerns have been expressed about the impact of projected demographic changes on HE, in terms of both an aging population generally and a specific decline in the numbers of 18-20 year olds. Government thinking (and the recent IUSS Select Committee report) both point to a need to look to part-time provision and workplace learning to maintain participation levels. The immediate problem is, as the Select Committee noted, current funding differentials provide little incentive to expand p/t provision. It is probably easy to make too much of the demographic risks, but it does seem likely that demographic changes will have at least qualitative effects on the diversity of paths, provision and institutions in future higher education.

Technology: from my relatively non-technical perspective the role of technology is a difficult issue – will it be a driver of change, or more a tool which may help us respond to change? I suspect the answer will continue to be a bit of both. That said, in terms of learning and teaching, certainly, we tend to be behind the curve and that may have to change if we are to respond effectively to the other challenges I have identified.

Beyond Text Conference – Edinburgh

I was up in Edinburgh this weekend, having been invited by Zenon Bankowski to be a commentator (along with Tony Bradney) on papers that he and Maks Del Mar had written for the opening of their conference, Beyond Text in Legal Education. The conference was the final event in a series of activities that have formed a project funded by the AHRC as part of its Beyond Text programme. Day 1, Saturday, focused on ‘theory’. Sunday focused on ‘practice’. It was a really excellent and engaging event. Most of those attending have been participants in earlier stages, and it was a really good, international, mix of people – academics (not all law), legal practitioners and practitioners in the arts, and these are by no means mutually exclusive categories – like I said, it’s a really interesting group.  Paul Maharg has written an excellent general review of the whole event at Zeugma, but there are three particular elements of the first day that I’d like to focus on here.

Zen and Maks’s opening papers made a distinction between the education of attention and the education of encounter. I like that distinction; it seems to ‘work’ as a phenomenological account and has practical (and ethical) resonance, and application. Attention (drawing on thinkers such as Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, and Roland Gaita) emerged as an encounter of close attentiveness to objects and contexts (Murdoch) – of objects (including persons) as things in themselves and in their settings, and an openness to experience that is both detached and loving (Weil). Attention is I understand it from their presentations seems, almost paradoxically, to be both passive in its openness, its ability to wait (attendre) and “receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate [our thought]” (Weil), and active, in a sense of both active contemplation, and as a responsiveness, a readiness to receive and care for (again attendre) another. This links to the importance of encounter. The encounter with another is understood as more than just an idealized encounter. It is the (actual and embodied) context in which attention happens. Without encounter we have no call to attend, but attention also enables us to come, openly, patiently, and trustingly, to encounter. The question then is how do we build the practices of attention and encounter within the law school?

A number of suggestions emerged out of the later sessions. I’ll focus on just a couple of the sessions here, the two that were the most interactive (and I appreciate this is no coincidence, it not just reflects my bias towards active learning, but I think these also worked well in demonstrating the potential for taking attention and encounter beyond text. Alan Lerner (U. Pennsylvania) took us through an exercise in which he gave us a fact scenario and then asked us quickly to rate the culpability of the five actors on a scale of 1-5 indicating least to most culpable (with no split votes or shared scores). I won’t entirely spoil the story, but the point was, when we compared results, that there was no single actor who didn’t have both ones and fives, and pretty much everything in between. Alan made the point that neuroscience demonstrates that our responses are based primarily on emotion – the emotional response ‘kicks-in’ before the rational brain can take charge – and also that such emotional factors are hard to dislodge. Indeed Alan seemed to be suggesting that on the whole the rational brain serves to offer post-hoc justification for the original emotional response. The implications of this for understanding the dynamics of encounter, and the role that emotion plays in encounter are fairly evident, but no less significant for that.

The other session I’d like to focus on was one introduced by Jim Moser of Dundas & Wilson, and led by Antony Psaila and Tor Clark from Steps Drama. Steps use improvisation and interactive drama (based on a model we later learned was called ‘forum theatre’) to explore conflict in organizations. Starting from a basic brief they improvised two interactions – one between a lecturer and a student upset by a mark she had obtained in a group assignment, and the other between a law firm partner and senior associate over the latter’s exclusion from a project team. In both scenarios our role was to observe, discuss, and provide the actors with advice on what to do next, and then watch the consequences of our advice unfold. There were some definite ‘there but for the grace of god…’ moments! What differentiated it from more conventional role play was that the actors stayed in role pretty much throughout, which was more engaging and I think gave us a much greater sense of being in the moment with the characters. The level of debate and discussion these exercises generated in our group was clear testament to the power of the technique. It also showed what could be done by skilled actor-facilitators who had really honed their skills of attention and had created scenarios that avoided easy, two dimensional (good/bad) categorization of their character’s motivations. Great stuff!