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.