No abstract

There is an increasing pressure calling for legal education’s evolution into building more practical competencies to better prepare law students for practice upon graduation. Collaborative learning between law students and social work students in a clinical setting enriches their respective educations well beyond their respective traditional curricula. By working together, the students learn other methods on how to handle different clients and their unique situations and how to work with someone of a different disciplinary expertise with the same client. This article begins with a law student’s mishandling of an initial client interaction, discusses the advantages of an interdisciplinary education with social work students and then reimagines the initial encounter after the law student has been taught by an interdisciplinary partnership between law and social work schools. Law students gain a better and broader perspective when working alongside social work students to tackle problems that they not only face in a clinical setting, but also will encounter both in practice and in life.

Attorneys new to practice often find themselves completely unprepared to assist emotionally distraught clients. Traditional law school curricula do not mandate coursework on how to interview clients or how to involve clients in the representation plan. The knowledge, values, and skills taught in schools of social work can be useful tools to address many common challenges faced by lawyers. The authors argue for transdisciplinary education in which social work educators teach courses in law schools. Systems theory, cultural competence, and the strengths perspective are used as examples of practice approaches that could greatly enhance the services provided to clients seeking legal services.

This case study will focus on the authors’ efforts to engage students in one asynchronous, online undergraduate legal pipeline course, and the substantive revisions made to the course over three years to increase student engagement, self-reflection, self-regulation, and metacognition. A “pipeline” program is designed to identify, support, and guide students from diverse backgrounds to the graduate level field of their interest (Cunningham & Steele, 2015). In this paper, the authors will discuss their initial efforts to engage students and facilitate self-regulation, and the substantive revisions made based on user data for two subsequent offerings of the course. The authors will describe two strategic uses of the learning management system (LMS) to increase student engagement and self-regulated learning. First, the authors detail a weekly reflection and engagement routine that was developed to address concerns regarding student-to-faculty engagement identified during the first version of the course. Second, the authors outline a scaffolded multi-week skills-based activity that was developed to reinforce a critical course learning objective and help students monitor their own learning progress. During each iteration of the course, user data collected from the LMS and other integrated tools, along with student feedback and instructor and designer reflection on practice, informed substantive revisions to the learning activities described. Over three versions of the course, data suggest increased engagement, self- reflection, and self-regulation. Finally, the authors will reflect on the implications of their work and possible applications to other settings.

A criminal record is an anchor that stays with you even after you have paid your debt to society for the crime you committed. Indeed, that record can make it nearly impossible to meet your basic needs, especially housing, employment, and education. To assist in meeting these needs, Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana and the Legal Expungement Advice Program (LEAP) created by the Civil Practice Clinic of the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law have aligned with each other and worked together to give qualifying individuals a second chance. This article examines the intersection of these two Indianapolis-area programs providing resources for employment and expungement that help persons previously charged or convicted of crimes get back on their feet -- and stay that way.