The Transforming Initiative

As described in the book’s Introduction and Afterword, Transforming Legal Education is an invitation to develop theory and practice about how we learn and teach law at all levels.  The Transforming Initiative provides a platform for those of us who are interested in contributing to the debate about the future of legal education – students, paralegals, staff in HE, FE and schools, trainers, consultants, trainees, HR personnel in legal service providers, fee-earners, PSLs, CABx – whoever!  Here’s how it will work. 

Stage one: read the Afterword

The Afterword to Transforming Legal Education is reproduced here (by permission of Ashgate Publishing).  It presents a summary of the book’s themes, and a brief account of an hour or so of a student’s time spent studying in the year 2047.  The narrative is designed to be a spring-board for your ideas.  It’s exploratory, tentative, stimulating, possibly irritating, and will, I hope, raise many questions about what such a future will look like – not just technologically, but educationally, intellectually, economically, culturally, socially. 

Stage two: develop your ideas on the wiki page on this site

One way of predicting the future, as Alan Kay is reported to have said, is to invent it.  Another way is to circumvent the present from becoming the future by creating or developing something else.  However you define it, the future is there to be created anew, and this is what the Transforming Initiative is about.  Around the nucleus of the book’s Afterword we’ll be forming a community of practice around the concept of the transforming legal education: is transformation possible? what needs transformed?  who will it affect? how will that transformation be enacted?  why does it matter? when might it come about? 

The function of the Afterword is to act as the grain of sand in the oyster – to stimulate you into thinking about such matters, to agree with them, to agree with qualifications, to elaborate on them, to disagree completely and present your own alternative transformations.  We’d like you to form views, link up (or not) with the Afterword, and present what you think might or should be a transformed future for legal education.  What are your ideas about how law should be learned, taught, assessed in the future?  What are your practical suggestions, techniques, case-studies, examples of good practice, successful implementations, that might help to transform legal education?  It might be a big initiative, it might be the merest change to classroom technique – it doesn’t matter.  All ideas are welcome. 

To help get people started, the four main ideas of the Afterword are set out as a structure for the wiki – Experience, Ethics, Technology, Collaboration.  We don’t need to have this structure in the final text, and indeed alternative structures are welcomed; but until we come up with something better, we’ll stick with this. 

Stage three: the conference

Depending on numbers of authors who contribute to the wiki, we’ll be holding a conference for Editorial Board, editors and authors in September 2008, where we’ll be listening to wiki authors developing their ideas, sharing practices and discussing theory.  Conference themes will arise from authors’ ideas and editorial teams’ work will be form the focus of conference themes...

Stage four: the book

Depending on the shape and size of the wiki, we’ll be editing the book.  It has no name or content yet because you will be providing both name & content on the wiki.  As the wiki-text develops we’ll be looking for a publisher; but it may be that the wiki will remain as a wiki – it very much depends on content – in other words, on you.