Law Student Field Projects in Community Law

Fran Ansley

From spring 1996 to this writing in Summer 2004, I have been experimenting in different ways with the use of community-based field projects as a teaching method in law school. At my count, over the span of those eight-plus years, 176 students have carried out 96 team or individual projects in connection with 18 different courses or independent study projects under my sole or joint supervision. The courses have covered a range of substantive topics, the projects have been variegated, and my own goals have often been complex. Accordingly, it is not easy to draw out the lessons from such a multi-faceted undertaking. Nevertheless, drawing out lessons is the task this section is designed to begin.

The most compelling research on how to translate today’s strong learning theory into practice suggests that teachers need to design their courses and their methods in light of their goals for student learning. Learning goals are, of course, never set once and for all in stone. Like everything else in teaching, they should be subject to continuing re-evaluation and cyclical adjustment. Nevertheless, says the research, learning goals should drive course assignments, should thread explicitly through class discussions, and should inform the various kinds of formative and summative assessments planned and carried out by the teacher. Further, they should be fully visible to the students throughout the trajectory of the course.

No matter how convincing and commonsensical these conclusions may be, I find that articulating course goals, and making sure they strongly inform course assignments, discussions, and assessments, turns out to be a particularly difficult mandate for me to obey. My goals seem always to be numerous, complex, and ever-evolving, even when I do my best to pin them down.

Further, in a fieldwork course that takes seriously its external component, things are even more complex. Goals for student learning do not occupy the entire field, but share it with other equally demanding objectives related to the impact and quality of the work done and relationships built in the community. With many others in the service learning movement and its various tributaries, I take the view that student learning goals in my courses do not have automatic primacy over community service or community justice goals. Both sets of goals are primary. Often, of course, the two sets are complementary. (In fact, at one level, having my students understand why I put the needs of the community on a par with or higher than the needs of law students is one of my primary goals for student learning!) But in reality, at least in the immediate term, student learning goals and community service goals will sometimes conflict, and when this happens in my classes, there is no automatic trump for student learning over community benefit.