Project History

Fran Ansley
For a number of years here at the University of Tennessee College of Law I have been teaching classes in which law students carry out community-based fieldwork with local organizations and agencies. The projects are law-related, but they seldom involve the traditional provision of legal services, tending more often to fall into the category of community legal education. In most of these projects, the education about law ends up flowing both ways: my students and I learn from community partners how law and the legal system actually operate in their complicated lives, and in return we work to find and communicate back to them what “law on the books” currently has to say about their rights and vulnerabilities.

In the 2000-2001 academic year, I had the good fortune to join a cohort of scholars at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. During that privileged year, I was given the chance to look more systematically and reflectively at my experience with fieldwork as a pedagogical method, and to do so within an interdisciplinary circle of fellow teachers. All of us in the cohort were actively engaged in learning about “the scholarship of teaching and learning,” while carrying out specific inquiry, analysis and reflection about our own teaching practices through a variegated array of concrete research efforts.

My own project with Carnegie focused on the use of community-based fieldwork, and this web page is one direct result of that endeavor. I hope it will prove useful first to future law students who are trying to imagine and design projects of their own, including students here at the University of Tennessee who may be trying to better understand what I am looking for, or open to, when I assign community fieldwork. Second, I hope it will also be of interest to teachers in law schools and elsewhere who want to use similar strategies in their courses.

A note of warning about time

The process of making the site has involved much more than I anticipated at the outset. Many of the tasks involved in building a website call for special skills and hardware, and all of the tasks require time – occasionally a lot of time. Delays were occasioned by many factors: the need to secure funds and technical assistance; the need to get input, approval and consent from students who had already graduated and moved on, as well as from their community collaborators; the transaction costs involved in doing something in fits and starts that required repeated re-capturing of where I had left off the last time; and the fact that the world of website creation, HTML, Dreamweaver, and digital imagery has been an entirely new one for me.

In retrospect, it is clear that I could never have carried this project to a successful launch had it not been for the opportunity to collaborate with a member of our law library faculty who brought key technical skills and know-how to the table. Cathy Cochran, the College's computer services librarian, agreed to join me in this project soon after it began, and she has played an indispensable role at every stage since.

A word from Cathy Cochran

Like Fran, I had little idea what would be involved with this project when we first began. Although my specialty is information technology, I had never built a site that was this complex before, and I was acquiring many of the needed skills on the fly as we worked through the various problems we encountered. I was able to provide liaison to technology people and technology resources around campus, to advise on hardware and software questions, to finish constructing the site after the designer turned over the basic structure to us, to create audio-visual features, and generally serve as all-around producer in consultation with Fran about content and appearance.

Fran and I agree that we have enjoyed this collaboration. Both of us are glad we undertook it, and both of us feel we have learned a great deal from the process. We are also proud of the final product. On the other hand, we also agree that it is appropriate here on the "Project History" page of the site to observe that this project's history was lengthy and at times demanding. The chronology we have set out below should make this statement a bit more concrete. 

Basic chronology

Summer 2001 - Fran decides to build website

Fall 2001 - Grant acquired from campus technology program (estimated launch: 2002)
Cathy joins the project

Winter/Spring 2002 - With web designer at IT center, developed tentative structure

Summer 2002 - Assembled and got student approval for first two permanent exhibits

Fall 2002- Spring 2003 - Created/mounted more content, revised some structure

Summer 2003 - Took over the partly-finished site from the IT center

Fall 2003- Summer 2004 -Finished creating and mounting the exhibits and Teacher Overview

Fall 2004 - Launched the site!

Viewers who are interested in using the web to go public about their own teaching and learning, but who are a bit daunted by the time-line set out above, should visit the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It provides information about the Foundation's Knowledge Media Lab and its KEEP Toolkit, "a set of web-based tools that help teachers, students and institutions quickly create compact and engaging knowledge representations on the Web." The Toolkit offers a way for teachers at all levels to create displays in much less time than the present site seemed to require of two novice web-builders who were learning on the job.
<www.carnegiefoundation.org/KML/KEEP>