bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Instructional Design and Student Learning in Professional Legal Education
Authors: Macfarlane Julie , Boyle Pat 
Published: June 2021

The study which is described in this paper was designed with two complementary objectives in mind. The first objective was to carry out research to discover more about student conceptions of their learning in an educational program which would introduce a new approach to learning and challenge their expectations. The researchers — an instructional evaluation specialist and a law teacher — were particularly concerned in the first stage to explore as wide a range of student conceptions and reactions to the learning process as possible and then to attempt to draw some general observations from those results. A phenomenographic1 approach was used to leave open the possibility of discovering unintended and unexpected outcomes. The phenomenographic approach focuses on “mapping the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive and understand various aspects of and phenomena in the world around them.” To this end, the researchers sought from student respondents as wide a range as possible of personal responses and reactions to their learning experiences and environment. The second objective of the study was to consider the question whether or not the design principles of the new program achieved their intended outcomes. These design principles and their anticipated implications for student learning described in detail below. The second objective of the project was therefore to provide information for decision-makers3 with which to evaluate the success of the new program in achieving its stated goals (including intended processes) and on which to ground program revisions and modifications for the second year of operation. These two drivers for the study provided a dual motivation to explore the impact of this new program on a sample of its first year student entrants. In order to ensure that the research results from the project could be meaningful and usefully translated into evaluative judgements about the success of the program in meeting its goals, three working hypotheses were formulated which were used to guide the data-gathering phase of the project; that is, face-to-face interviews conducted with the students. The three working hypotheses were derived from the design principles of the new program and knowledge of the students’ previous educational experiences and approaches to learning. The design principles of the program and the working hypotheses themselves are discussed in detail below. The empirical stage of the study took the form of a set of one-on-one interviews with a sample group of students from the new program, just three months into the program. The methodology used for these interviews, the working hypotheses which guided them and an analysis of the data derived follow below.
Improving the Quality of Learning in Law Schools by Improving Student Assessment
Authors: Rogers Nicolette 
Published: June 2021

Internationally and nationally there is an exciting wave of renewed interest in improving the quality of higher education. In the context of legal education, law schools across Australia are engaged (or soon will be given the new push towards academic “accountability”), in the sometimes painful process of examining and evaluating the effectiveness of their teaching. Whilst it is essential when considering how to encourage students to adopt qualitative learning approaches to consider the effect of all elements in the learning “eco-system” on the student, it is my thesis that student assessment plays not only an important, but a critical role in influencing their approaches to learning tasks. I am encouraged by the similar sentiments expressed by such pre-eminent writers as Paul Ramsden, William Twining and Professor Kahn-Freund. Indeed, it is a tragic indictment on the legal education system generally that it is now a quarter of a century since Professor Kahn-Freund pleaded that “… difficulties or none, a start must be made and the first thing to be reformed is the examination system. This reform is the most urgent job confronting the present generation of law teachers”. In 1987, in Australia, the Pearce Committee6 reported the prevailing method of assessment used by Australian law schools as the problem-type examination at the end of the semester: In all law schools except Macquarie and UNSW, a substantial majority of the subjects taught are assessed as to 50% or more of the possible marks by means of formal end of year or semester examinations. In my own law school in 1992,80 per cent of the subjects offered will have examinations worth 80 per cent or more of the total possible marks available. If the examination system was in need of “urgent reform” twenty-five years ago, this generation of legal educators risks losing complete credibility if it does not engage in a wholescale review of its assessment procedures.
The Participation of Indigenous Australians in Legal Education
Authors: Lavery Daniel 
Published: June 2021

This paper is based on a survey of Australian law schools in 1990–91 which sought to investigate the interface between indigenous Australians and law studies. The survey was prompted by similar recent research conducted in Canada. The focus of this paper is the Australian data but a review of the Canadian scene will be given to show the depth of field which exists. The Australian survey results will be first presented. A survey of the Canadian scene will follow with the interest being on the special entrance schemes available to Indian, Metis and Inuit peoples and the existence and operation of pre-law programmes in Canada. Although this paper cannot purport to be truly comparative, comparisons and contrasts will be drawn where possible. Some general conclusions will then be drawn with a particular emphasis on one aspect of the legal education of aboriginal peoples which is not present in the Australian analysis, that of an intensive nationally-based pre-law preparatory programme. It will be argued that, as a matter of priority, efforts should be directed to the establishment of such a programme in Australia. A note of caution should also be firmly struck at the outset. This paper is from the perspective of a Euro-Australian lawyer within the dominant legal culture. This writer cannot, and does not purport to, give the indigenous perspective.
Evaluating and Improving Teaching in Higher Education
Authors: Ramsden Paul 
Published: June 2021

There are three main issues to consider in any consideration of the evaluation or assessment of teaching in higher education: the nature of good teaching; its measurement; and its promotion. It is a poignant commentary on the mood of higher education in Australia and the United Kingdom that few discussions of educational quality, accountability, and the appraisal of academic staff have engaged with these issues at other than the most superficial level. Policies have been formed and are being implemented in apparent ignorance of the accumulated educational knowledge that enables these key questions to be rationally addressed. This article is an attempt to redress the balance by providing a perspective on evaluating and improving teaching performance which brings educational principles into the foreground. The first part deals with the characteristics of effective teaching in higher education and critically reviews the related issues of appraisal, the use of student ratings, and the measurement of teaching performance. The second part examines how we might use evaluation to improve the quality of teaching.
Recent Statistical Trends in Australian Legal Education
Authors: Weisbrot David 
Published: June 2021

[Extract] Law Schools The central message of the Pearce Report on Australian Law Schools was that legal education in Australia is being run on the cheap, and this is a Bad Thing. The moral for Vice Chancellors, University Councils and Governments, however, is that legal education in Australia can be run on the cheap, and this is an Absolutely Splendid Thing. In 1960, there were six university law schools in Australia — one in each state capital. By the mid-1970s the number had doubled, with second law schools established in Victoria and Queensland, three new law schools in New South Wales, and another established at the Australian National University in Canberra. One of the law schools in each of Queensland and New South Wales was established in an Institute of Technology, foreshadowing the end of the binary divide in higher education. By the mid-1990s, the number of law schools will double again. New law schools have already been established, or are about to be established, at seven more public universities: Murdoch University, Wollongong University, Newcastle University, the University of the Northern Territory, Flinders University, Griffith University and James Cook University. La Trobe University’s well-known legal studies department is also set to begin offering LLB degrees for the first time, in addition to the BA in Legal Studies. Similarly, the legal studies group within the Business and Commerce Faculty of the University of New England, in Armidale, NSW, is currently taking active steps towards the creation of a separate law school. The University also has a branch in Coffs Harbour and is one of the leaders in distance education, so that there are arguments in favour of this move despite the already crowded field. The conversion of the legal studies department into a law school at the University of Canberra is also strongly rumoured. Further, there is also likely to be pressure soon to establish a law school at the University of Western Sydney, which already houses some legal studies departments at its separate campuses and is located in a heavily populated region which is poorly served by professional faculties (and services).
An Oversupply of Law Graduates? Putting the Statistics in Context
Authors: Parker Christine 
Published: June 2021

In the last 12 months there have been a spate of stories in the press warning us of an impending “glut” of lawyers. The most frequently quoted “fact” is that there are as many law students as there are lawyers. Professor Bob Williams of Monash University has warned that the growing number of law students is a “potential catastrophe”, and the Queensland Attorney-General has predicted that “we will end up in the same situation as California, where large numbers of lawyers are wandering around … looking to create work” by “ambulance chasing” or touting. But further research into statistical trends for Australian lawyers and students indicates that the real story is more complex and less alarming than the headlines suggest. First, careful collection of statistics shows that it is simply not true that there are almost as many law students as lawyers in Australia. Secondly, the argument that there are too many law students is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that all law students become lawyers, without sufficiently defining the term “lawyers”. It also fails to take account of graduation rates, attrition from the profession and the number of graduates who do not remain in the law. Finally, reports of the student “glut” have taken an ahistorical approach to the statistics and failed to examine the past ratios of students to lawyers. The purpose of this paper is to set out the statistics as accurately as possible for analysis and planning. Accurate statistics on law students and where they go after graduation, as well as the composition of the legal industry, are necessary in order to plan for legal education and to make judgments on the future prospects of law graduates.
Contextualising Law: An Attempt to Operationalise Theory by Teaching Interviewing in the Law School
Authors: Leaver Alan 
Published: June 2021

In the Pearce Report three major goals of law schools were identified as similar to those of universities: to undertake research; to service the community; and to teach.1 Achievement of the last goal required going beyond the mere “imparting of knowledge” to include (among other things) an understanding of the law in operation as well as in context, and to develop in students practical legal skills and competencies that were essential to all types of legal work, notwithstanding the degree of separation of that work from the practice of law.2 The recommendation was made that this objective could be achieved by teaching specific practical legal skills such as advocacy, communication, counselling, drafting, interpretation of legislation, negotiation, and research and writing.3 One inference to be drawn from the above recommendation is that the teaching of law can be improved, and the perceived separation of the theory and the practice of law narrowed to some extent, by incorporating practical legal skills into the curricula of law schools. This hypothesis, that teaching and learning of law can be optimised by creating and maintaining a substantial and realistic nexus between legal theory and legal practice,4 finds support from recent research in general educational theory and methodology of other practice-based professions.5 However, research in Australia to support that hypothesis in regard to law in the interim since the publication of the Pearce Report appears to remain limited if special issues of periodicals,6 specialist periodicals7 and projects supported by the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching8 can be relied upon as indicators of research. This alleged limitation exists notwithstanding attention being brought by the Pearce Report to the relative paucity of writing, and to the almost absolute absence of empirical data, on legal education.9 A movement towards incorporation of such a practical approach, endorsed at the time of publication of the Pearce Report by some commentators10 and subsequently supported by others,11 has occurred since the release of the Pearce Report, especially in newly established law schools which have been innovative to varying degrees,12 thanks in part to support from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching. This paper describes one such innovation in legal education, the teaching of interviewing skills as an addition to the mooting component of the criminal law course, adopted at the Law School of the Flinders University of South Australia and supported by a grant from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching during 1994. The mooting framework of the criminal law curriculum into which the interviewing project was placed is detailed before outlining the educational theory that justifies the choice of interviewing. The interviewing project is then briefly described.
Improving the Quality of Higher Education: Lessons from Research on Student Learning and Educational Leadership
Authors: Ramsden Paul 
Published: June 2021

A few years ago David Minton published a book about teaching skills in adult education.2 To introduce an idea about the importance of the teacher’s experience as a key factor in the quality of learning and teaching, he described his own experience of eating a delicious dish of garlic mushrooms in a restaurant in the Beaujolais. Madame served, and her husband did the cooking. But Minton made a mistake. He asked Madame for the recipe. “Monsieur,” came the withering reply “It is not what, it is who.” Minton realised then that he had asked the wrong question. The difference between one dish of garlic mushrooms and another does not depend on the recipe, but on the person who cooks it. Much the same is true of the quality of university teaching and university courses. There are no certain prescriptions for good teaching. There are no foolproof techniques for guaranteeing quality. There are only teachers, and educational effectiveness depends on their professionalism, their experience, and their commitment. We must ask the right questions in the search for quality. We must emphasise the importance of the “who” in order to achieve quality. What does it take to improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education? More importantly what will help us, as teachers, to achieve improvement? In this article I would like to illustrate how some of the ideas from student learning research might be used to improve the quality of university education. There are three areas I want to apply these lessons: helping the novice lecturer to become more expert; providing appropriate academic leadership; and using methods of evaluating teaching and courses which combine the need to assure quality with the principal purpose of enhancing it.
Law Teaching Reconceptualised
Authors: Brun Marlene Le , Bond Carol 
Published: June 2021

For many years programmes designed to improve the quality of teaching in institutions of higher education focused on how to teach — the techniques of teaching. The Australasian Law Teachers Association Law Teaching Workshop was no exception. This quite technical emphasis parallels a “technical rationalist” perspective, which reflects an epistemology of practice derived from positivist philosophy. The maintenance of such a philosophy allows one to adopt an atomistic view of knowledge, one which is based on the assumption that teaching is a “bag” of skills that we collect and perform; thus, good teachers display a range of techniques and methods which are readily transferable irrespective of subject matter. By divorcing discipline and pedagogical epistemologies, for example in education and law, this approach fails to recognise that good teaching is grounded in a marriage of the two, as we advocate here. Moreover, it inhibits the further development of our understanding of what constitutes good teaching in law. In this article we describe the redesign of the Australasian Law Teachers Association (ALTA) Law Teaching Workshop, which was made possible by the award of a Commonwealth Staff Development Committee (Cathie) grant to Griffith University and the Queensland University of Technology in 1994. This new, holistic model embodies a reconceptualisation of law teaching in which teaching as a practice is not only embedded in the epistemology of education but also in that of law.
Throwing Students in the Deep End, or Teaching Them how to Swim? Developing ‘Offices’ as a Technique of Law Teaching
Authors: Kift Sally , Airo-Farulla Geoffrey 
Published: June 2021

“Offices” (teacher-less, cooperative learning groups) were introduced to Griffith University in the Law School’s first year of teaching in 1992. They were further developed through two National Teaching Development Grants from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching in 1993 and 1994. The 1993 grant was used to refine the first year program and to develop a second year program as that year was first taught. Similarly the 1994 grant was used to refine the second year program and develop an Office program when third year was first taught. The Offices project has two main aims: to develop in students a range of skills valued by employers, but not traditionally part of the core law curriculum; and to provide “situated” learning of substantive legal material. It was first discussed in an article in this journal in late 1993. As that article noted, the project is still very much in its formative stage, and undergoes continual evaluation and redesign. This article reports on the developments and lessons learned during the implementation and evaluation of the 1994 grant. Part 1 sets out the cognitive theory underlying Offices and the relationship between the program’s main aims. Part 2 describes the background to the implementation of the 1994 grant, and Part 3 describes the Office tasks formulated during that process. Part 4 summarises the practical lessons we learned about how Offices should be run. Using Collins, Brown and Newman’s framework of “cognitive apprenticeship”, Part 5 evaluates the learning environment that we have constructed in Offices, and proposes paths for future development. Finally by way of introduction, it should be stated that the observations and conclusions set out in this article draw extensively on the results of a range of evaluative measures. Particularly the 1994 project was evaluated through continual informal student feedback during the life of each program, student surveys conducted at the end of each of the four semester programs, regular sharing of perceptions and analyses between the staff involved in its implementation, through discussion of the Offices project at the Faculty’s governing committee, and by comparing the learning environment with the “cognitive apprenticeship” framework referred to above.
Women’s Work: The Inclusion of the Voice of Aboriginal Women
Authors: Behrendt Larissa 
Published: June 2021

Interesting issues arise around the intersection of including women’s work in any law school curriculum and the experience of Aboriginal women. As an Aboriginal woman it seems a natural personal focus for me. The issues that the meeting of women’s work and the experience of Aboriginal women raises are easily transferred through other areas of law. The issue of work and Aboriginal women needs to be looked at in an historical context.
Work and Gender in the Law Curriculum
Authors: Owens Rosemary J 
Published: June 2021

The construction of the law curriculum in our Law Schools is a crucial matter in the project of engendering the law so that it delivers justice. Inevitably the law curriculum presents a categorisation, or conceptualisation, of the law. The imposition of these categories is significant in a double sense. The world, including the law, exists for us only through categories. These categories comprise our world. They bring order to an otherwise incomprehensible and unmanageable chaos. For us to be able to engage with the world, it must be reduced to manageable categories. However, the categories which divide and construct the world do not exist independently of human community. Furthermore, the power to impose categories upon the world is a creative act which simultaneously constructs the creator as a subject in the world. In the past the law has been the creation of men not women. And in the law women have been constructed as objects not subjects. The process of curriculum reform is thus an opportunity to create ourselves, women, as subjects in the law in a double way. Because the construction of the law and the world through the imposition of categories is so important, I will devote most of my attention to this issue. I will, however, also briefly address three other related points — the importance of always seeing the law in its social context, the issue of resources in the new curriculum and a methodology for teaching and learning in the new curriculum.
Uncovering Issues of Sexual Violence in Equity and Trusts Law
Authors: Sarmas Lisa 
Published: June 2021

What does the issue of sexual violence against women have to do with Equity and Trusts law? Most students and scholars of the subject would say “very little”. In this paper I argue, on the contrary that the issue of gendered violence does indeed arise in this subject-area but it is usually rendered invisible by an overly narrow view of what counts as appropriate legal scholarship and pedagogy. The aim of this paper is a modest one: it is to take one narrowly defined “legal” method — case analysis — and turn it on its head so that it forms the basis of a critical, context-sensitive pedagogy which makes space for an exploration of the issue of sexual violence within this subject-area. By employing what I call “critical case analysis” in three doctrinal areas of Equity and Trusts law — undue influence, unconscionable dealing and fiduciary relationships — I hope to show that issues of sexual violence do arise in this subject; that these issues are often omitted or inadequately dealt with by courts and traditional scholars; and that critical case analysis can be a useful pedagogical tool in our classrooms for exposing and exploring such issues.