Virtual learning environments such as the fictional Scottish town of Ardcalloch equip future lawyers with the legal knowledge and professional skills they need in the real world, so let’s embrace the concept more widely, says Paul Maharg
For a town that doesn’t exist, Ardcalloch seems to be attracting a faire measure of attention. Ardcalloch is a virtual town, created as the context to a decade of experiments in transactional learning in Scotland’s equivalent of the LPC, the Diploma in Legal Practice, at the now-defunct Glasgow Graduate School of Law. What were these experiments, why was a virtual town necessary, and what lessons are there here for legal education generally?
The town was – still is, at Strathclyde University Law School – the backdrop for a number of innovations in legal education. It gave us the ‘realia’, the sense of the real that was used in legal simulations. Out of our practice we formed a new pedagogy called ‘transactional learning’, derived from John Dewey’s educational philosophy. The seven principles were straightforward and mutually supportive: learners would engage in active learning through performance in authentic transactions involving reflection in and on learning, extensive collaborative learning, and holistic or process learning, with relevant professional assessment that included ethical standards. Students were formed into virtual firms of four and throughout the programme carried out transactions in conveyancing, private client (wills, trusts and executries), practice management, a civil court action, and a personal injury transaction. We supported their learning with multimedia (see figure 1), webcasts in place of lectures (see figure 2), discussion forums, inter and intra-firm forums, transactional flowcharts and much else. We used intensive learning techniques in a Foundation Course to help the virtual firms form the trust that was essential if learning was to take place not just about the law but about themselves as professionals.
Learning through simulation
With funding from JISC and HEA we designed and built an open-source platform called SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Learning Environment) that enabled other professions to take part in this form of simulation learning – it was used in Architecture, and Management Science, for instance.
We also collaborated with the Rechten'¨Online Foundation, funded by the Dutch government, on an online international simulation business simulation involving GGSL students based in Ardcalloch, and Utrecht Hogeschool Business Studies students, based in the Dutch virtual environment of Cyberdam.
Others internationally are using simulations in innovative ways. Roberto Corrada’s Labor Law class at Sturm College of Law, University of Denver is a classic example of how students can learn about how the socialisation of law in its context affects law’s operation. Another example is the educational practice of an attorney, Stephanie Kimbro. She practises education as she practises law, teaching digital lawyering with a virtual firm simulation. In a course entitled ‘Unbundling and the Future of Legal Services’ at University of Dayton School of Law, students are assigned readings from Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? then they are registered in the Total Attorney practice management platform in a virtual firm, with case files and tasks to undertake, e.g. for their final grade students complete a law firm business plan. But here’s the twist: as part of their work for the course, students also have to register through the firm portal as a client with a legal need, and their experiences as a client are then the subject of discussion and reflection in debrief that feed into the readings from Susskind.
Simulation is often dismissed as only relevant to professional programmes such as the LPC or BPTC, where students learn about professional practice. But this is not so. The Cyberdam Business students were undergraduates. At Glamorgan University Law School Karen Counsell has used SIMPLE not only in a distance-learning Masters programme with students in Hong Kong, but also in an undergraduate LLB first year Torts module (in a fictional Welsh town, Cwmfelin).
In this module Karen substituted the simulation for a conventional essay assessment: the result was much more student engagement and a substantial improvement in the conventional closed-book examination results. While it is unwise to make too much of the effect of the simulation on student learning within what is, after all, a multi-factorial situation, the fact that the only major change to the module was the introduction of the simulation is significant. According to Karen, students were much more exploratory with the principles as well as the practice of law; there was less evidence of surface learning; and staff could offer just-in-time support to students in the transaction that was more effective for '¨the simulation than conventional seminar-based tutoring.
Wide application
Simulation environments are of course used in other disciplines – Researchers at Karolinska Institute at Uppsala University and Stanford University have developed a case simulation system for medical students for instance. Nor does it need to be virtual. At Dundee University Medical Faculty, Clinical Skills Centre, there’s a simulated hospital ward used not just for student medical education but as part of the national Doctors in Difficulty programme. The classic use of simulated patients has been adapted from medical education by an international team of academics for law students, now termed the Standardized Client Initiative, and used successfully in law schools at Strathclyde University, Northumbria University, Australian National University, University of New Hampshire and elsewhere, and is in development at the University of Hong Kong. In this simulation, lay people are trained to do two things well and to specific standards: tell a client narrative in a naturalistic way, and assess a lawyer’s or law student’s client-facing skills. It is used in undergraduate as well as professional programmes and in the QLTS. It can be used for learning or high-stakes assessment, and easily links to other skills, e.g. writing or drafting.
Simulations can be used to reverse engineer situations, too. You may recall the near-miraculous escape of passengers on US Airways Flight 1549 after engine failure caused by bird strike several minutes after taking off from La Guardia Airport in New York. Captain Sullenberger had three options: return to La Guardia, make for an airfield in New Jersey, or ditch the aircraft in the Hudson River. We know the choice he made – but was it the correct one in the circumstances?
In post-flight analysis, the timings, flight and weather data were fed into a flight simulator, and the results revealed, in repeated simulations of the incident by experienced pilots, that the aircraft would not have made it back to '¨La Guardia or the New Jersey airfield without crashing.
Positive effects
Could we adapt this for law? Three examples will show how. First, the work of James Stratman, Leah Christensen and other rhetoric researchers on how lawyers and students read cases has shown conclusively the positive effects that professional role can play in enabling comprehension of legal judgments. Second, as part of the firm tasks in Ardcalloch, students wrote client bulletins for their firm, and (since the students, unsurprisingly, wrote 500 word client e-bulletins as 2,000 word academic essays) we employed specialist web writers who wrote for real law firms to teach students valuable compositional skills for a digital environment. A third example is the Feminist Judgments Project, published recently as a book, in which a group of feminist socio-legal scholars have “written alternative feminist judgments in a series of significant cases in English law”. As the website puts it (echoing the work of academics such as Christensen), the result is legal critique that “puts theory into practice”.
In a compelling way it also designs and models alternative ways in which we can understand the processes of judicial reasoning, in much the same way that an architect will model a building or a landscape architect a landscape in order to discover and explore the constructed space. More generally, Karen Counsell’s Tort module and the Feminist Legal Judgments project show that simulation is not merely a way of learning legal practice: in the simulation students can learn deeply about the content, nature, cultures and contexts of legal regulation itself.
None of this is radically new in education. The idea that you learn more by being experientially involved in what you are learning goes back to John Dewey’s Laboratory School in the 1890s at the University of Chicago, and Maria Montessori’s Casa dei Bambini in the early years of the twentieth century. Actually, it goes further back – to the founding of kindergartens and the work of Pestalozzi in the eighteenth century. Why, then, do we not do more of it?
This is a complex question, involving issues such our teaching and institutional cultures, and the dominance of what has been called the ‘signature pedagogy’ of a discipline. According to Lee Shulman this is the hegemonic cluster of educational practices that define what any particular profession’s (or indeed academic) education should be. These are powerful and not easy to disrupt. The very strengths of the SCI, for instance – the primacy of the client experience, reliance on the rigorous training of lay people to undertake high-stakes assessment, the import of medical scientific and statistical assessment approaches – are also its weaknesses. In Shulman’s terms, it is the opposite of a signature pedagogy, a shadow pedagogy, in part because it relies on a literature and on educational practices that are still alien to most legal academics and lawyers.
Another issue is the extent to which law schools have rarely shared their practices with each other at a deep level. But these are explanations for the status quo, not reasons for adhering to it. Richard Susskind’s consultation report for LETR last month is a welcome reminder to the LETR team to consider disruptive methods of learning, and to rethink the law curriculum for a digital era. But it’s also a call to all legal educators: we can, and should, '¨do better.
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), which has facilitated Ardcalloch's launch, also recorded some of the users' experience as part of its 'Learner's Voices' project. Below is Amanda's:
Learner's voices: Amanda
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