“Bush Law 101”: Realising Place Conscious Pedagogy in the Law Curriculum

Abstract

In 2012, a team of academics from six universities worked on an OLT-funded project, ‘Rethinking Law Curriculum: developing strategies to prepare law graduates for practice in rural and regional Australia’. The project was motivated by the declining proportion of lawyers being attracted to and remaining in practice in rural and regional Australia. The main outcome of the project was an open education resource designed to sensitise students to the realities of the rural and regional legal practice context in the form of a customisable curriculum package that can be embedded as components within existing units of study, or developed as a stand-alone unit. Three of the team members have now implemented the curriculum package within their law school programs, two in the form of a stand-alone elective unit delivered to undergraduate law students, and the third to support placement programs for law and paralegal students. Applying the process of peer observation and collaborative reflection, this paper reports on their experiences to offer insights on how to adapt and integrate the ‘Rethinking law’ package within the law school curriculum. In particular, this paper will discuss the significance of place-consciousness as a pedagogical tool, and the capacity of the ‘Rethinking Law’ package to encourage law students to ‘re-imagine’ careers in rural and regional Australia and their role as the country’s future lawyers.

Employability Learning and Teaching Research: A Twenty Year Structured Narrative Review

“…Hargreaves (2016), for example, discussed the critical importance of reflection and reflective practice in the context of medical education, with "reflective competence" (p. 1) being a key skill taught progressively in the Leeds University medical school curriculum in the UK. Kennedy et al (2016) reported on a novel place-based learning initiative for law students (Bush Law 101) and explained how embedding collaborative reflection opportunities into the curriculum enabled students to learn how practicing law in regional and rural areas shapes their professional identities. Reflection was also shown to have other benefits for enhancing student employability.…”

“…Exposing students to work-related knowledge promotes skill development applicable to their future careers (Bandaranaike, 2018;Kennedy et al, 2016), with WIL often acknowledged as providing a point of difference for higher education students to enhance their employability (Hodges & Martin, 2020). WIL and reflective practice enable integration of theory and practice to develop nuanced knowledge and skills in a variety of professions, including teaching (Ramsaroop & Petersen, 2020) and medicine (Hargreaves, 2016).…”

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct as a Site of Conscience: Using Institutional Pasts to Shape Just Legal Futures

“…156 Place-conscious pedagogy locates education at the point of students' material and physical circumstances, encouraging them to understand where they fit in the world and to be more aware of their accountability to others. 157 In contrast, conventional legal education predominantly occurs in the confines of law schools and by reference to books and lectures, 158 distanced materially, affectively and geographically from the people and places that the laws impact. This is problematic because it contributes to the disjuncture noted by American legal theorist Robert Cover between law and the material acts it enables (eg the sentencing judge from the prison).…”