There is an increasing focus on enhancing employability for students in higher education. Yet academics who facilitate and encourage opportunities to support student employability are often doing so with a quiet agility. This paper reflects on my first year coordinating a work-integrated learning program and the development of skills necessary for…

Degree apprenticeships offer a new route to a degree in UK higher education, with policymakers emphasising their social mobility potential to widen access to graduate professions. In this context, this article compares the employability perceptions and strategies of aspiring solicitors on traditional university and degree apprenticeship routes in…

Young law students often get confused over the appropriateness and logic of using different terms in contracts and contractual clauses. This improper understanding of the right usage in the initial years usually sustains in their profession as well. Consequently, vague terms and ambiguities often become the root causes of contract interpretation…

This article develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The article is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures,…

This article revisits a moment in the recent history of education in Aotearoa New Zealand when te reo Maori as a language of the university came under intense scrutiny. The original incident took place in 1991 in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand, when two students of Waikato Law School wrote answers in te reo Maori to an examination question…

Social Learning Analytics (SLA) seeks to obtain hidden information in large amounts of data, usually of an educational nature. SLA focuses mainly on the analysis of social networks (Social Network Analysis, SNA) and the Web, to discover patterns of interaction and behavior of educational social actors. This paper incorporates the SLA in a smart…

An interdisciplinary approach has been adopted for undergraduate Law and Social Science students attending separate seven-week intensive language communication courses run at the University of Helsinki. The challenge has been to anchor this pedagogical development within theoretical frames of reference that contextualise the interdisciplinary PBL…

Reflective practice is an essential component of experiential learning and is embedded within the curriculum at York Law School, where the undergraduate law programme is delivered using a problem-based learning model. Using qualitative data from a survey of the markers of one of the summative reflective tasks, and Bernstein's evaluative rules as a…

University law schools have been beset with a sense of schizophrenia ever since first established in the 19th century. They were unsure as to whether they were free to teach and research in the same way as the humanities or whether they were constrained by the presuppositions of legal practice. More recently, this tension has been overshadowed by…

The discourse around student wellness is a marked feature of the 21st century Australian legal academy. It has resulted in various initiatives on the part of law schools, including the development of a national forum. The phenomenon relates to psychological distress reported by students through surveys. Proposed remedies tend to focus on improving…

The Australian Learning and Teaching Council's Bachelor of Laws Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement identified "thinking skills" as one of the six threshold learning outcomes for a Bachelor of Laws Program, which reinforced the significance of learning, teaching and assessing "thinking skills" in law schools…

In an Australian legal education context, there is minimal research on designing and implementing a court report as a summative assessment task. This journal article attempts to fill this gap by reflecting on the journey of a legal educator who pioneered a court report for a core final year course in a Bachelor of Laws program with large cohorts…

Since "Courting the Blues" was published by Kelk, Luscombe, Medlow and Hickie in 2009, legal educators across Australia have been measuring psychological distress in law students, as well as implementing and evaluating strategies to support students' well-being. This paper reports on initiatives implemented at the Newcastle Law School in…

"Thinking like a lawyer" is traditionally associated with rational-analytical problem solving and an adversarial approach to conflict. These features have been correlated with problems of psychological, or emotional, distress amongst lawyers and law students. These problems provide a strong argument for incorporating a consideration of…

While field trips are often employed in primary and even second level education as a pedagogical tool, aimed at exposing students to real life experiences, such activities are not as popular at third level (Falk and Balling, 1982; Muse, Chiarelott and Davidman, 1982; Anderson and Zhang, 2003). However, such experiential learning techniques can be…