Playing with Ruleplay

What is ruleplay? This a neologism I use to describe the exploration of rules systems as a way of understanding legal and regulatory theory. Law has much in common with other rules systems and we can expand our understanding of regulation by comparing practices in law, sport, games and other rule-oriented contexts such as computer programming or even the following of patterns and instructions. Further, the idea of play, is an important aspect of rule-oriented activity, we test the limits, look for loopholes, find inconsistencies and develop strategies for engaging in rules environments. There is a pleasure associated with understanding, navigating and being fluent in rules.

Learning Module: Logic and legal problem solving

Download the module here.

I have a friend with a maths degree who gets enraged when anyone suggests that she must like Sudoko. It may use numbers as logical symbols but it is not maths. It is, however, logic. Logic is a subject which has fallen by the wayside with the disappearance of the Hogwarts style classical education or, rather, the expansion of academic opportunities to those who don't come from elite schools. I don't know, they may still teach logic at Eton, but who cares, really.

Teaching tip: using video in lectures

Many of us like to support our lectures with documentary or films that support learning activities, give students a different way to apply knowledge and afford them a break from listening to us rabbit on. But how do students respond to this?

Making the most out of feedback

Getting better at any activity is contingent on good quality feedback. Unfortunately, in the tertiary teaching context, we rely heavily on the bluntest of tools, the student feedback survey. While these defects are well known to those who are clued in on teaching and learning issues, they are often used by administrators and bureaucrats who don't understand how to interpret the data, especially for the purposes of promotions. Worse, some unis want to use these surveys to performance manage staff or even want to publish them like ratemyteacher.com.

Teaching tip: Attendance dropping off?

This is a common issue, once week seven or eight rolls around and all the assignments are due, it can be hard for students to get motivated to attend. Even attendance/participation marks seem to be little motivation, and many unis prohibit their use as it can be difficult to verify and moderate.

Learning Module: Household Dilemma

Download the module here.

This one is an oldie, but I think a good one. Using the scenario of conflict resolution in a student household, students step into the role of different legal theorists to answer questions about law and justice. Rather than alienate students at the start (ugh, not theory!), each of the positions is presented as a different student character - Thomas Aquinas is just Tom the theology major, Karl Llelwyn just Karl the busines student.

The Changing Face of Legal Education

It's always a little puzzling when people talk about 'traditional legal education' because legal education has always been in such flux, any equilibrium has been so temporary. It seems that those who like to use the term are a) complaining about something new being different from when they were at law school or b) use it as a straw devil, thinking that their fantastic new teaching idea is going to shake the foundations of the grey beards' orthodoxy. Take the long view and legal education as a collective effort has been changing and evolving, embracing new technologies and approaches as the law itself evolves. Common law method equips you with tools for change.

Teaching Tip: Assessing Reflective Journals

Reflective learning is increasingly used in higher ed, particularly for team projects or situated learning where the academic has no direct access to the learning environment. An online journal is a popular format, either an open blog, or more commonly one within the closed confines of an online learning system managed by the uni.

Reflective Learning – Where it's at?

It is a little strange to see the enthusiasm for reflective learning at the moment. I first encountered the concept about ten years ago as a means to assess situated/practical learning, a concept which was pretty fringey at the time. Basically, there was a small group of academics who, dissatisified with the lecture/exam didactic form of learning, were looking for ways to assess real knowledge production and work, connected to real projects. After all, there is so much real work to be done in the community, why spend out time building intricately crafted mazes for the students to run through?

Learning Module: Talking Like a Lawyer: Legal Language

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All first year students feel swamped by the amount and complexity of the reading they are expected to do. This exercise provides a broad selection of different quotes on the theme of violence and asks students, without knowing where each quote comes from, to discuss what the quote means and whether they think it comes from a legal or other source. Of course this also opens discussion for what a legal source actually is.

65th Annual ALTA Conference 4-7 July 2010

The Australasian Law Teachers' Association annual conference is in Auckland this year. I'm going, it should be a good one.

You can see the conference page here.

Learning Module: Legal Knowledge and Reflective Learning

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This is a two part exercise that works best if there is a week between classes for students to reflect and think about their knowledge. I tend to combine this with other learning modules during each of the weeks, but you might find that students have enough meat to fill a class, especially if you return to them with 'new developments' in the scenario.

This task asks students to think about the way in which disciplinary knowledge effects your point of view (POV) on a social issue or dispute. The first part focusses on an interpersonal dispute, the second takes that dispute into the broader social context.

This is a fairly introductory task and it does allow for problem based learning – there is no specific correct answer and part of the fun involves seeing how the different disciplines contest each others knowledge, particularly how law insinuates itself as the top dog in the knowledge pack.

In the second part of this task we introduce reflective learning, give students a short guide to reflective learning and then ask them to reflect on their answers to the first part, using the second task as a means of returning to the original ideas, but from a different angle. Most students will find that if a week has elapsed between tasks, that their knowledge will have evolved, they will have discussed ideas with others and drawn connections between the task and other areas of study. If they have done these things and can describe what has happened, they are well on the way to becoming reflecitve learners.

Teaching tip: An alternative to the roll

There is little more depressing than taking a roll in class. It is a symbol of a certain kind of top down education, the classroom of Pink Floyd's 'We don't need no education'. However, if we take no notice of student attendance they can often feel anonymous, disconnected.

Drawing instead on the conference metaphor, I like to use name badges and then collect attendance data on the basis of which badges are left in the box, or if using team based learning, by moving from group to group and taking note of who is working with whom. It is also a good way to put names to faces, which I can never achieve when taking a roll.

I generally find this is a much more positive way to start a learning activity and it supports the role of the professional rather than the student as a subject of academic disciplining. I'm keen to hear what others do.

Learning Module: Role Models and Bad Influences

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This is a basic activity which is useful as an icebreaker. This should provide a topic that all students have something to contribute on.

This is also a good starting point to think about professional identity and the influence of others on the way in which we define our own identity. You can also catch up with what all the kids are watching.

I have found some groups tend to focus on Judge Judy as a 'safe' topic for discussion, sometimes only the mavericks are willing to discuss other preferences and mark themselves out as individuals. I am not sure if this is because the 18-23 demographic do not watch law shows on tv or whether this is a kind of groupthink. Maybe Judge Judy is just that popular? I have considered removing Judge Judy from the list of suggestions in case this is leading the discussion.

Talking Legal Literacies

Assuming that this blog has done a reasonable job in convincing you that legal literacies have an important place in the law curriculum, how do you go about introducing students to these concepts? I'm happy to present Talking Legal Literacies, a short book of legal literaacies learning modules which can be used individually or as a course of study where each builds on the knowledge laid down in earlier tasks. This was one result of our initial legal literacies grant and these activities are scaffolded into my first year unit, Legal Research Methods.

Eventually, I will post each of the different modules to this site as individual learning modules, along with a commentary on each exploring how they have worked and evolved over time. As usual, this is all under a creative commons license which allows you to use, remix with the usual limitations on noncommerical use and attribution.

In my Legal Research Methods subject, these 10 modules are used for weekly tutorial/seminar tasks. Each team has a student team leader who writes a reflective report worth 30% of their assessment. This means that reflective learning has to be introduced in the lectures and in the tutorials and students need the confidence to develop their reflective learning capacity. This is particularly worrisome for some students as the tasks do not require academic references (although they can do further research if they want to) and the method foregrounds a student's own learning process as uncharrted territory for exploration.

It is very important to set clear learning objectives for reflective reports, SOLOs for each grade level, tied to subject objectives.

Each module contains help for students writing reports. A 'putting it all together' section connects the task to broader course concern and a 'think about it' section which poses a set of reflective questions, any one of which could be developed as the backbone of a report.

Reflective learning. Some students hate it. They want a lecturer to assert authority, tell them whether they are right or wrong. But on the whole students seem to appreciate the need to develop their reflective skills, especially if they aim to do workplace and situated learning as part of their course. Interestingly enough, this year we've had the some of the first students to report that they did reflective learning at high school, so perhaps it will not be such a strange idea for long.

What are legal literacies?

Education has always been touted as a great leveller, an institution which can empower the disempowered, give voice to the voiceless and provide an escape from poverty. Why is it then, that the elite professions still tend to be dominated by those from elite backgrounds? What role do schools and higher education play in reproducing, rather than challenging dominant power structures in society?

Pierre Bourdieu's work in the sociology of education took on the understanding that both economic capital (money) and social capital (family connections) played a part in smoothing the way for students from elite backgrounds. Given exactly the same learning environment, students found that access to these capital resources made the journey easier than disadvantaged students. Bourdieu found that there was also another form of capital at work – cultural capital.

Cultural capital involves many different factors including language and discourse, ways of thinking and seeing, a sense of belonging and the confidence to participate. Bourdieu also describes cultural capital as “the feel for the game”. Cultural capital involves a fluency in the language of power. There is a strong correlation with economic and social capital, but it is not dependent on these. For example, the child of a trade union representative may grow up with talk of law, power and compliance around the dinner table which may help them in their study of law where a sheltered middle class child might find it all confounding to begin with.

My idea of legal literacies was developed out of a university teaching and learning research project where we sought to understand the transition problems faced by disadvantaged learners – those who are first in family, do not have english as first language or are economically disadvantaged. We found that in the context of law, cultural capital involved at least three forms of literacy:

Legal Grammar and Expression
Legal education involves learning new words as well learning different ways of using words, of splitting hairs and understanding different forms of interpretation, such as literal verus purposive readings. Ordinary words like intention have a special meaning in legal contexts.

Rules Literacy
We all use rules systems but lawyers need a deeper understaning of meta rules, theory and strategy. The concept of ruleplay, working inside, outside and at the peripheries of rules systems has crucial importance for lawyers.

Legal Media and Intertextuality
Legal texts have their own rules for interpretation and, importantly, these texts exist in a network, where meaning is derived from the relationship between one authority and another. This is more than mere legal research skills, it is as much about understanding context as it is locating an authority.

Out of the original Legal Literacies project we developed learning modules which we embedded in our foundation units, strategies to give students a helping 'leg up' to speak as as a member of the legal community of practice. Rather than simply conferring knowledge, or training skills, we found that legal education also involved creating an environment where students could learn to express themselves as legal professionals, to gain the confidence they need through safe experimentation and to construct their own identity as law and justice practitioners.

This site involves research/discussion of the legal literacies concept as well as practical application through learning modules and teaching tips. These will be published under a creative commons license (see sidebar) and are available for you to use, adapt and remix as long as your use is non-commerical and you remember to attribute my contribution to your final creation.

Kicking off....

I love Drupal, I really do. As an open source product, it allows you to build all kinds of exciting online content. I really wanted to do my own Drupal based Legal Literacies site, but after struggling for 12 months I have realised that I don't have enough room in my brain to develop and moderate a site, AND write content for it.

So, enough procrastinating, I'm here with the true and trusted Blogger so now I have no excuse.

Bear with me while I transfer the posts from the old site. It may be a little while before new material goes up and May will look kind of busy.

I'll be posted about all kinds of teaching and learning issues in the law/justice context but some of this might be interesting to teachers in other fields. In my next post I'll explain what the concept behind this blog is, and how it came to be. I also want to post learning modules, teaching tips and discussion for all. Anything published here will fall under a creative commons license (see the sidebar) and will be available to use, remix and experiment with. Just like preschool but without the playdoh. Actually, I lie, there will be some playdoh.