Enhancing Legal Education Through Small Project Working and Co-Creation
Noel McGuirk
My first experience of university teaching came in 2010, when I took up a postgraduate teaching assistant role at the University of Birmingham as part of my PhD funding. Although the contract was temporary, it provided three years of relative security while I progressed with my doctorate. From the outset, I became acutely aware of the shifting landscape of teaching and research in higher education. Expectations were high: academics were required to be both excellent teachers and excellent researchers, often with limited institutional support to meet these demands. Since then, the instability across the sector has only intensified, particularly for early career colleagues, who are increasingly expected to deliver more with fewer resources. Against this backdrop, I would like to reflect on what how we can enhance legal education through small group project working and co-creating our content with our students as co-partners. My focus is on the fundamental questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’ we teach, questions that remain central to my practice and have been shaped by Biesta’s (2015) challenge to consider not only what education is, but what it is for.
In this post, I want to consider the benefits of using small project working to develop and improve student experience. Small project use is about creating a space for students and lecturers to work together to develop the student experience from developing content for learning to designing student support structures to help law students develop throughout their undergraduate learning journey. You will see that I like to rely a lot on scholarship to reflect on my ideas, I encourage you to do the same – I found it transformative.
In almost all my teaching roles at university a recurrent theme that I have experienced has been the jam packing of content into programmes. This approach to teaching is wedded to what Gardner (1991) and Lave and Wagner (1991) would consider as focusing our teaching on cognition development so that our teaching fills our students to the brim with knowledge. The problem that I have found with this is that it doesn’t really help students develop in their individual learning journey. As Resnick (1989, p.9) suggests focusing on knowledge as the ‘holy grail’ is problematic as it fails to give due regard to how knowledge is generated to enact student personal learning and development.
I have progressively moved to what Lyle (2003) explains as being a socio-cultural model of learning that adopts the view that knowledge is a shared truth that is developed by lecturer and learner in the lesson. At its simplest, this is recognising that our lecture halls, classrooms, workshops, seminars, academic advisor meetings, pastoral care meetings – all interactions between our students and us can be viewed as being a shared space from what we teach to how we teach to maximise our student personal learning. I am not advocating departing from professional regulatory standards that are often imposed in shaping the content for law programmes, but it is about respecting the boundaries of what we have to teach and reflecting on the level of detail we include as well as how we engage our students to become responsible citizens who will be ready to take their place in society.
At its core, it is about considering, reflecting and thinking deep about how we listen to the student voice in our decision making in our teaching practice. (Whitty and Wisby, 2007, p.306) In reading this you are probably well aware of the different student voice initiatives that your law school will already have in place, what I am referring to here is listening to the student voice to help you consider what should we focus on in our classrooms as well as how we design our programmes. It is more than reflecting on the student voice in student-staff committee meetings or individual feedback obtained either in mid or end of module reviews, but rather it is about engaging directly with students to co-create the student experience. It is not about giving students free reign, after all we have spent many years studying to become professional legal academics, but more about how we can harness the student voice in a shared space between lecturer and student. I acknowledge that this shared space as Bahou (2011, pp. 4-7) explains is challenged by the imbalance in ‘authenticity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘power’ given you will be the person involved in setting the student’s examinations as well as marking examinations.
I have used co-creation to listen to the student voice this throughout my teaching practice. I have relied on co-creation to develop teaching content to share the space over what content we include in programmes as well as how I teach my students in small group teaching sessions. This involved obtaining a small grant from my law school to co-create content for the ‘English Legal System and Skills’ module I lead at Lancaster University on a first-year law programme. My small group initiative here was to advertise a two-hour workshop where students and teaching staff would co-create content for one topic on the module, the English criminal justice process. I invited applications from students and the small grant allowed me to offer vouchers in recompense for student time preparing for and attending the co-creation workshop. I set the specific focus on developing a reading list with accompanying activities for students to complete on a newly redesigned workshop. This process started just after the students had attended the ‘old’ or standard version of the workshop so their experience of reading and completing the tasks were fresh in their minds.
Before the workshop, I set very short list of reading tasks on how to improve the design of teaching and this helped to focus students minds on the focus of our project. During the workshop, I divided this into three segments – we started with exploring the core issues in the criminal justice process to help identify the core learning objectives we would want students to take away from this newly redesigned workshop. We progressed to reflecting on considering the literature we would want students to read, watch or listen to before coming to this newly redesigned workshop. This involved spending time in the workshop researching the literature and putting students into small groups to identify reading. The final part involved reflecting on the activities we would want first year students completing during the workshop. This was the most interesting part as students were able to identify a series of seen activities as well as unseen activities to challenge their learning. With some minor tweaks to the redesigned workshop, I was able to adopt this in subsequent years and I found it was an invaluable way to explore ‘what’ we should teach our students but also ‘how’ we do it a little authentically by listening to our students in helping them throughout their personal learning development.
I have also used this in other areas such co-creating the student support system by getting students working together on designing student support structures in the law school. This involved using a set of personas that chart the student journey, and the common challenges students experience throughout their learning. We asked students to design the support structures that they would view the most effective in responding to the challenges experienced by students. This helped to reflect on how we support our students in academic and pastoral care initiatives in our law school.
The value in reflecting on what and how we teach our students is to help us to become better educators by at least considering the student voice so that they become active agents in their personal learning development.
Where Next?
As you develop a small project, you may wish to consider how your work might make an original contribution to legal education literature. Peer Reviewing for a publication such as The Law Teacher is one way to understand how to position your own work.
Or
After completing a small project, you might consider sharing your findings through attending an Academic Conference or outputs such as journal articles in The Law Teacher.
Where After?
Adopting new teaching ideas can feel daunting, but small steps make a difference. While we may not control lecture content or assessments, we do shape our teaching style. This is where we can involve students as partners in their learning, whether through the way we deliver seminars, the examples we choose, or the opportunities we create for dialogue.
I learned early in my career at Lancaster University that students themselves are a valuable resource. Asking them simple questions (How could this be better? What would help you learn?) opened up small but powerful changes in my teaching practice. Not every suggestion needs to be adopted; the key is selecting what fits your style and context. I have found teaching is a process of trial, reflection and refinement, with progress often coming through small, deliberate adjustments rather than sweeping change.
Sources:
Bahou, L, ‘Rethinking the challenges and possibilities of student voice and agency’ (2011) Educate – Special Issue 2
Biesta, G, ‘What is Education for? On Good Education, Teacher Judgement, and Educational Professionalism’ (2015) 50(1) European Journal of Education 75
Gardner, H., The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group 1991)
Lave, J and Wenger, E., Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (Cambridge University Press 1991)
Lyle, S., ‘An investigation into the impact of a continuing professional development programme designed to support the development of teachers as researchers in South Wales’ (2003) 29(2) Journal of In-Service Education 295.
Newton, R., Mutton, J and Doherty, M., Transforming Higher Education with Human Centred Design (Routledge 2024)
Resnick, LB., (ed) Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc 1989)
Whitty, G. and Wisby, E., ‘Whose voice? An exploration of the current policy interest in pupil involvement in school decision-making’ (2007) 17(3) International Studies in Sociology of Education 1
