Things aren't what they used to be: collective responses, spiralling skills and the curriculum

Helen Carr and Kirsty Horsey (University of Kent) presented a paper reflecting on a curriculum review project and the ‘spiralled’ embedding of skills training.

Helen and Kirsty’s slides are embedded below, and their full paper is available to download at the bottom of the page.

Academics agree – there has been an extraordinary shift in the nature of the student body over the last 15 years, and pedagogy in higher education has struggled to keep up. There is a tendency to blame the students for the consequences of change – they are not as engaged, lack cultural capital, are risk averse and are instrumental in their approach to education. At the same time technology has worked some sort of possibly malevolent pedagogical magic, transforming expectations of the presentation of teaching.

The consequence is that the core law curriculum is ‘dumbed down’, remedial skills are compulsorily delivered and research active staff increasingly distance themselves from teaching undergraduates. Presentation becomes as important as substance – students, positioned as consumers, rate their lecturers. Lecturers respond by entertaining students, provoking responses rather than thought. There have, of course, been alternative approaches. York Law School, with the benefit of a clean slate, has devised a problem-based curriculum. Other law schools use specially designed tests to filter out students who do not demonstrate the necessary aptitude for traditional pedagogy.

Kent Law School, however, drawing on its tradition of resistance, has devised a collective response to the consequences of the democratisation of higher education, intended in part to enable the school to continue the delivery of a critical legal education while enabling the new student body to learn and engage with core law topics.

Kent’s radical overhaul of the curriculum takes as its starting point that there are benefits in the majority of students not being ‘like us’ and that the engagement of research active staff with the design and delivery of core teaching is a pre-requisite of pedagogical quality in higher education. Rather than confining the teaching of skills to one particular module, it seeks to embed them in the core curriculum and ensure that they are both practised and assessed, and that students do not see acquiring these skills as separate or discrete ‘hoops’ to jump through, but recognise that each skill can contribute to their own progress and development in a multiplicity of ways. Drawing on innovations in medical education, we have conceptualised our project as a ‘spiral’ curriculum in skills.

The presenters’ paper considers two specific aspects of Kent Law School’s five year curriculum review project:

• The development of a new style of textbook, using online facilities to provide students with opportunities to practise and revisit skills in the context of the core curriculum while providing a series of different entry points for students of different abilities or with differing rates of progression.

• The creation of a radical new curriculum that maintains a critical ideology and embeds skills, delivering, re-delivering and embellishing these at strategic points throughout the degree and simultaneously engaging students and research active staff.

The paper reflects on the complexity of devising an embedded skills spiral at the same time as focusing on large scale curriculum review, concluding that curriculum development, including the development of innovative pedagogical resources to support the learning of core legal content with spiralled skills, must be simultaneously a collective, continuing and reflexive process.

Further reading:

• Harden R & Stamper N (1999) ‘What is a spiral curriculum?’ Medical Teacher 21(2):141-143
• Howe A et al (2004) New perspectives: approaches to medical education at four new UK medical schools BMJ 329:327-331
• Webb J (1995) Extending the theory/practice spiral: action research as a mechanism for crossing the academic professional divide Web JCLI 2

About the presenters

Helen Carr is a senior lecturer and Director of Learning and Teaching at Kent Law School, and was co-ordinator of the curriculum review team.

Kirsty Horsey is a lecturer at Kent Law School and has responsibility for the delivery of legal and academic skills support for undergraduate students.

They are also two of the three authors of Skills for law students, OUP, 2009.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010