National Teaching Fellowship Award 2004

Nigel Duncan, a lecturer at City Law School, was one of two law teachers awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2004. In this article from the Autumn 2004 issue of Directions Nigel describes his proposed project – for the latest information see Ethics in the undergraduate curriculum: an international wiki community.

Right: Nigel Duncan collects his award from Sir Howard Newby, Chief Executive of HEFCE, and Sir David Watson, Vice Chancellor of the Unviersity of Brighton and Chair of the NTFS Advisory Panel

I have been fortunate enough to succeed in an application for one of this year’s National Teaching Fellowships. I would firstly like to express my thanks to City University for nominating me. In particular, thanks are due to Vaneeta d’Andrea and Bruce Macfarlane, colleagues at the Educational Development Centre, and to Clive Holtham, a former National Teaching Fellow, for their encouragement and assistance with my application.

The Fellowship provides me with a fund of £50,000 in total, which I am expected to use over a period of three years. Inevitably, I intend to use a significant part of it to buy out my time from my responsibilities at the Inns of Court School of Law, but my project will also involve my visiting a number of UK law schools, so you may find me contacting you in due course to facilitate my best use of those visits.

My project is designed to develop a curriculum model for addressing how ethics are best addressed in undergraduate and professional courses. It flows from my existing experience in designing teaching and learning approaches which encourage students to take responsibility for their learning and in designing clinical programmes which introduce students to the real context in which law impacts on members of the community. As such I hope that it will contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning in law and provide a valuable resource, both for those designing programmes which look critically at the behaviour and practice of lawyers and for those seeking to develop law curricula in more experiential directions.

My initial proposal is to visit a variety of law schools to provide a structured interactive workshop for students, addressing the type of ethical dilemma which lawyers encounter and seeking their responses to those dilemmas. They will also be asked to identify the motivating values for their decisions. This should help them in critical thinking, and provide an explicit link between the personal and the object of their study, which should enrich their contextual understanding of the laws and legal systems they study. It is this proposal with which I may seek your co-operation.

Student responses to the dilemmas and espoused values will be collected, together with demographic details and information about the nature of the educational experience they have had. Analysis of these will enable me to evaluate the impact of diversity between individuals. Follow-up of individuals as they enter vocational programmes will enable me to evaluate the effectiveness of this learning tool in sensitising students to the values underpinning professional ethics.

The choice of universities will include those actively addressing ethics, using experiential methods or service learning methods, to provide contrasts with those using none of these. This should enable an evaluation of different learning approaches so as to support the development of a particular curriculum model.

I am conscious, however, that work has been done in this area in other jurisdictions and in relation to other professions. My initial task therefore is to read and explore the work of others in the field. I have just returned from an international conference at which I met a number of people with relevant experience, and this has provided me with resources which may result in changes in the initial proposal I presented above.

I intend that the outcome of this project will provide colleagues with materials and well informed practical guidance to develop curricula to address this field. UKCLE has offered support in the preparation and dissemination of the product of this project, and for that I am also grateful.

The opportunity provided by this Fellowship extends to participation in a network of National Teaching Fellows and other Higher Education Academy activities, and I hope that participation in this will broaden my opportunities for learning from colleagues in a variety of disciplines.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010