On 4 September 2015 the three Western Cape Law Faculties jointly focused their attention on issues regarding teaching and learning in law, especially at undergraduate level.
Justice Johan Froneman
Prof Vivienne Lawack
The one-day conference started with a keynote address by Justice Johan Froneman of the Constitutional Court. In his speech, titled “Transforming Legal Education: Incorporating Social Justice and Ethics into the Curriculum”, Justice Froneman urged legal educators in all fields of law to inculcate in their students an awareness of the role of the particular field of law in achieving the overarching values and goals of the Constitution, especially those relating to social justice and equality. Justice Froneman emphasized that there are no fields of law and accordingly should there be no subject in the curriculum that do not have a direct bearing on constitutional transformation and that a major objective of legal education should be to sensitize law students to that reality. He challenged law faculties to consider the impact that their approach to teaching law, including the content of the curriculum, has on the values and objectives of legal practice in South Africa.
Justice Froneman’s sentiments were echoed by Prof Vivienne Lawack, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at UWC and until recently Chair of the South African Law Deans’ Association. Prof Lawack noted that the traditional binary in legal education between engagement as serving the legal profession (training practitioners) and the ivory tower of academia is not useful in rethinking the role of legal education in South Africa’s constitutional democracy. She called for an integrated vision of legal education as engagement in which high quality teaching and learning, high level research, a fit-for-purpose curriculum and making a sustained difference towards bettering society should be key objectives. This, she argued, can only be achieved if the transformative aspirations of the Constitution are fully integrated into the undergraduate law curriculum as now also required by the new LLB standard.
Dr Karin Chinnian of UWC sharing her experiences of designing tutorials for first-year LLB students.
Dr Cecilia Jacobs
Other speakers included Prof Suellen Shay, Dean of the Centre for Higher Education Development at UCT, who addressed the topical issue of “Decolonising the curriculum structure”; Dr Cecilia Jacobs, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Stellenbosch University, who focused on “Collaborative teaching: Insiders and outsiders in legal education” and Dr Sherran Clarence of the Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University, who spoke on “Law as a ‘knowledge’ code: A new approach to aligning legal curricula and pedagogy with the underlying goals of legal education”.
A number of colleagues from the three law faculties also shared experiences from their own teaching and learning practice. These focused on issues such as the development of graduates’ legal writing competence; participation in contact sessions; the effective use of learning materials such as slides in lecturing; approaches to tutorials; developing students’ research and critical reasoning competence; and assessment.
The conference was initiated by the UCT Law Faculty as part of their teaching development strategy and the three faculties have expressed their commitment to continue this initiative and thereby establish an ongoing exchange on teaching and learning in law.