What is ‘research-led’ teaching in the context of the undergraduate law curriculum?

contributors | abstract | biographies

Contributors

Dr Helen Carr (University of Kent )
Nick Dearden (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Intended format

Paper presentation

Abstract

Many universities include research led teaching as a strategic priority. Indeed ‘research led’ is a ‘taken for granted’ indicator of quality teaching. However there appears to be limited research on what this means in general and to what extent it impacts upon the teaching of law in particular. This paper takes as its starting point the proposition that research-led teaching is better teaching. It begins by reflecting on the origins of and the meaning and aspirations, indeed the politics, inherent in the proposition. After considering the dissonance between what universities and what academics understand by it, what it includes and what it excludes, and how it actually affects practice in the classroom we suggest that research-led teaching may be a vehicular idea.

Vehicular ideas are ones which McLennan describes as:

…inclusive umbrellas under which quite a range of advocates can shelter, trade and shift their alignments and allegiances. It is not just that they are shaped by mobile cultural networks; the rubric and rhetoric themselves play a key role in constituting these networks. .. Unlike ‘final’ moral and theoretical vocabularies, vehicular ideas are recognized to have multiple interpretations, and a limited shelf life. They serve to make things happen at a particular time, after which their time may be up.

— McLennan (2004)

Vehicular ideas then serve as a way of managing and avoiding conflict about changes in practices by accommodating everyone’s understandings of an idea.

The paper tests its argument by comparing and contrasting the literature on research led teaching with qualitative data gathered by the authors in focus groups and surveys within four law schools, with distinct research and teaching profiles. The paper then turns to consider strategies used by different universities to deliver research led teaching in the core LLB curriculum, and how this is made meaningful to students, who frequently have little understanding of what is meant by research and even less on how it impacts upon their learning.

The paper then focuses on a practical and reflective effort to bring research into the classroom. It uses the work of the feminist judgment project, which strives to re-energise critical and feminist scholarship through the feminist re-writing of significant judgments, and the subsequent workshops which developed and disseminated teaching materials from the project. The workshops raised questions about learning outcomes, assessment, student engagement and student resistance. The aims were two-fold (i) to produce materials which would make the research available to a wider body of law teachers to use in their classroom and (ii) to ensure that those materials were informed by pedagogic expertise.

The paper draws on and seeks to make a contribution to critical and feminist thinking on legal education, but also suggests that for research led teaching to be an effective indicator of quality, and not simply a meaningless and potentially divisive concept, requires collaborative work between teachers and researchers, effective communication with students and critical scrutiny.

Short biographies of panel members

Helen Carr is Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of Kent. She has co-authored ‘Skills for Law Students’ ‘Law for Social Workers’ and several practitioner texts. She co-convenes Public Law in the undergraduate curriculum and is an active researcher in the areas of social welfare, feminism and the state.

Nick Dearden is currently leading a strategic review of the LLB at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is subject leader for Equity and Trusts and Company Law in a global context.

Last Modified: 10 December 2010