Clinic Is a Constructivist, Inquiry-Based Learning Environment: Lessons for the Start of Law School – Re-imagining an Immersive Induction

Benchmarks for higher education law study, both internationally and domestically, increasingly recognise the need to broaden the range of learning outcomes beyond traditional cognitive development concepts from knowledge and understanding to evaluation and synthesis, including the development of, amongst many others, reflective, self-directed, collaborative, skillful, and ethically aware learners. Clinical legal education can play a powerful role in developing these attributes but is very often provided in the upper years of undergraduate or even post-graduate studies. There is an increasing recognition that different learning outcomes and experiences should be integrated throughout the curriculum. This chapter will explore how students might be introduced to these elements at the outset of their programmes. Students can learn and benefit from aspects of the curriculum usually encountered only in clinical legal education programmes, to both deepen and broaden their understanding of “law” in all its contexts and to enable profound clinical learning – learning from and through experience – subsequently. A case study of a 1970s immersive curriculum, including a review and update, will be considered as a means of exposing the learning opportunities and challenges of such an approach.