Book summary

The Introduction sets out briefly some of the problems and issues facing legal education in the early twenty-first century.  It describes the pragmatic base to much of the book’s approach to theory and practice, deriving this from John Dewey’s pragmatic approaches to education, including his concept of the transaction between learner and the world. 

Thereafter, the book is divided into three Parts.  Part one (chapters 1 and 2) deals largely with the concept of interdisciplinarity – what is it, how can it be conceptualised?  How can it be put into practice?  How can it be assessed for effectiveness?  Part two (chapters 3-5) consists of three separate but related meditations on historical episodes.  Part three (chapters 6-9) is a set of case-studies in the use of technology within legal education.  The Afterword [link] draws together the book’s themes, comments on their wider significance and looks forward to a couple of hours of a student’s study time in 2047.

PART 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 analyses three forms of interdisciplinary endeavour – interdiscipline as subject-matter, as method, and as meta-awareness.  It begins with the narrative of a failure in interdisciplinary teaching: what went wrong and why is described.  The second case study examines the use to which rhetorical studies can be put in textual practices in legal education, while the third explores the application of research on forward and backward clinical thinking in medical problem-based learning to legal education.  Throughout, the chapter argues that awareness of legal education as a ‘trading zone’ is essential, and that teachers need a sensitivity to how, at a deep level, their teaching is interdisciplinary.

Chapter 2

The chapter opens with a discussion of the relationship between theory and practice, using in particular Lawrence Stenhouse’s concept of the teacher-researcher.  A series of three case studies that further advance the argument of the first chapter are presented: the relevance of poetic discourse in a poem by W.S. Graham, the Kodàly choral method, and the interdisciplinary application of research on standardised patients in medical education to standardised clients in legal education. 

PART 2

Chapter 3

The first of three chapters with historical themes, this one opens with an analysis of the realist curriculum reforms undertaken at Columbia University in the 1920s.  John Dewey’s place in these events is explored, as is the contemporary role played by E.R. Thorndike in the Law School.  Parallels are drawn to contemporary curriculum reforms, and the work of the New Legal Realist movement.

Chapter 4

Via a discussion of competence and ethical qualities by Ronald Barnett, we focus on one historical instance of the historical fissuring of ethical and educational discourse  – the lectures of Adam Ferguson, in Enlightenment Edinburgh.  His ethical dilemma, and his attempt to come to terms with it, is compared to aspects of the work of Gillian Rose, and the contemporary work carried out on justice communities in education. 

Chapter 5

This chapter contrasts two dramatically different but oddly adjacent technologies, separated by a mere 700 years or so – that of glossed literature, and online social software.  First we explore medieval reading and writing habits, derived from analyses of their texts.  Next, we examine how one scholarly form, the gloss, embodied many remarkable feats of compression, reference and was capable of sophisticated, multi-vocal argument.  Next we define hypertext and compare it to glossed literature.  Finally we examine the effects that social software may have upon legal educational methods – here, as with the study of glosses and other forms of information capture and retrieval, it is essential to understand how our models of reading and writing are changing even as we use them.

PART 3

Chapter 6

Continuing the technological theme of the book, this chapter focuses on aspects of contemporary games and simulations that are multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), the principles underlying the collaborative and social activities within them, and how they can be turned to legal educational use.  The chapter draws on a number of themes already raised in previous chapters – interdisciplinarity, and the use of rhetorical theory and educational theory.

Chapter 7

Following on from the previous chapter, we analyse the case study of simulations currently in use in a postgraduate professional course called the Diploma in Legal Practice at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law.  We also examine the development of transactional learning theory underpinning the practice, and its roots in Deweyan educational theory. Throughout there are examples of our practice, the ideas that shaped practical decisions, and the methods we adopted to develop deep collaborative learning. 

Chapter 8

What effect did transactional learning and simulation have on the curriculum generally?  This chapter analyses how such simulation-play affected the curriculum, and how the curriculum, staff teaching, administration and much else in the Diploma has been re-structured by transactional learning. In particular I show how the subject of Practice Management, hitherto a relatively peripheral subject, became a lynchpin for the whole programme of study.

Chapter 9

This chapter presents examples of the resources and media that can be distributed in cyberspace to support the simulations described in Chapters 7 and 8.  It examines some of the results of a research project that set out to discover how such resources affected the quality of student learning.

The Afterword

The Afterword draws together the main themes of the book – experience, ethics, technology, collaboration – and ends with a brief glimpse of a law student’s experience of learning the law in 2047.’