Description
Teachers are critical to impactful tertiary education, including legal education. Without the direction of academic teachers developing and delivering appropriate curricula, learners might as well be given a library card and told to do their best for the duration of their degree. Recognising this, there has been ‘increased accountability for the quality of [university] teaching’. But what makes for an effective teacher? It seems teaching experience alone is not enough. Instead, developing teaching expertise requires engaging in “reflective practice” to develop a cycle of continuous learning. Reflective practice is a means of learning from real life experience by critically considering it after the fact, and academics engaging in reflective practice to improve teaching are pursuing their own development in a manner consistent with Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, which we utilise to facilitate student learning.Reflective practice can be undertaken in many ways, including personal reflection and seeking feedback. It can also include accessing and considering insights derived from scholarly pedagogical “sources and resources” to determine if a teaching practice is consistent with, or can be informed by, findings published in literature. While this process is not time/effort neutral, there is a significant history of recognition that engaging in a scholarly approach to university teaching is an important and legitimate dimension of the academic role. It has also been widely argued that contributing to the scholarly analysis of learning and teaching is a legitimate form of academic research and should appreciated and rewarded by academic institutions. This is important, because without a broad range of high-quality pedagogical literature, the capacity of all academics to engage in informed reflective practice will be diminished. Despite the arguments for institutional recognition and reward for engaging in and publishing pedagogical research, and the importance of this research for the academy more broadly, there remains a number of obstacles to legal academics breaking into pedagogical scholarship. These include that most legal academics are discipline experts, often without previous training or expertise in education. This means they often have limited awareness of what constitutes high-quality publishable pedagogical analysis, how such research can be undertaken, or where it can be published. Some law academics may also not understand how engagement with the scholarship of learning and teaching, whether as a consumer or producer, can be beneficial to their academic role and career.
This presentation will interrogate those barriers. Editors from each of the English-language journals focussed on publishing legal education scholarship from around the world will discuss:
• What legal education scholarship is, and what it is not,
• The importance of legal education scholarship in the development of our discipline, and quality teaching generally,
• The individual benefits that can be derived from contributing to legal education scholarship,
• How to devise and engage in effective legal education scholarship and how to get it published,
• What editors of journals are looking for and our ‘red flags’,
• How to make legal education publications relevant beyond one jurisdiction and how to leverage these publications to develop an international profile.
| Period | 25 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Legal Education Research Conference : The Crowded Law Curriculum |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | AustraliaShow on map |