45th Annual Conference: Legal Education: Making a Difference

29th March - 31st March 2010

Event Details:

Starts: 29 March 2010 - 12:00 PM
Ends: 31 March 2010 - 02:00 PM

Location Details:

Venue: Clare College, University of Cambridge
Location: Cambridge
Address: Memorial Court Queens Rd, Cambridge
Postcode: CB3 9AJ

About the Event:

Online Booking for this event will close at noon on Wednesday 24th March, If you have any queries about late bookings, please contact Amanda Fancourt at altfancourt@aol.com or on 07732 953111

The Association of Law Teachers is delighted to announce that its 45th Annual Conference will take place in the ancient, historic and beautiful city of Cambridge, at the charming and inspiring venue of Clare College.

Students

Students are encouraged to attend (there is a special rate for students). It is intended to devote a plenary session to the student experience of legal education.

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Theme:

The theme of the 45th conference is Legal Education: Making a Difference. To what extent does legal education make a positive difference to students’ lives? How does it fulfil its dual aspirations of providing students with a liberal higher education that fits them with values and attitudes for life and, for those that choose to, fits them for entry to the professional stages of training for the profession?

The following topic streams are proposed:

Pedagogy

Innovations in pedagogy
Evaluating pedagogy: what works and how do we know?
Law and humanities: broader contexts, broader minds
Blended delivery, VLE’s and student engagement
Meeting the expectations of Generation Z (the Internet generation): implications of new cultural and social practices for pedagogy and evaluation.
Reinforcing practice: underpinning pedagogy with scholarly research

Assessment

Principles of assessment: how do we ensure it is authentic, valid, proportionate and affordable?
Fuzzy outcomes: can we capture what is valuable as opposed to what we can assess?
Innovations in assessment practice.

Quality, Academic Identity and Ownership

What do academics understand by Quality: administrative instruments or a paradigm of academic oppression?
Collegiality versus New Managerialism: what ownership of, and influence over, the academy do academics have?
Assurance versus enhancement: does Quality encourage or stymie inspiration?
Where is Quality going: all change at the QAA?
Space, time and communication: how do we support collegiality?

Staff development and progress

Best practice in staff development
Postgraduate teaching assistants – how should we support them?
In-house PGCE’s: do they work?
Academic identity: brave new world or old tribes and territories
Maintaining the tripos of currency: updating pedagogy, the law and legal practice

The Law Student: Perspective & Experience

Who are they? Expectations, behaviours and attitudes
Widening participation: means and abilities - minding the gaps?
What do they think of the legal education experience?

Proposals for other areas of interest to delegates would be welcome.

It is intended that the sessions will include individual papers, workshops, discussion forums, research work in progress reports and poster presentations based on the conference theme.

Submission of Abstracts

Full papers or abstracts of proposals for sessions at the conference should be sent by email to Chris Maguire (chrismaguire@bpp.com) by 27th November 2009.

Abstracts should provide a short description of the topic of the proposed session, the argument of the paper, the intended outcomes and the proposed method of delivery, the number of people involved in presenting and the IT resources, room space and room layout required. Authors should also indicate the minimum amount of time their paper would require.

In addition the abstract must contain a summary of any research the proposer has conducted in establishing the basis for their argument and the development of the topic against the background of the existing discourse and theory, where appropriate.