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Emerging Lessons
Introduction
Given the working list of goals set out above, what kinds of project settings are most likely to support their achievement? Nothing in community work is guaranteed, of course, but I am interested in identifying reasonably reliable predictors of situations likely to produce successful outcomes.
Of course, some elements of a successful project are less a feature of the placement setting and more my own responsibility as teacher and course designer. For instance, in my courses, I take some responsibility to help assure a concrete benefit to the partner group, and respectful treatment from the students. (The students and I talk about these issues in class, and they are woven into course requirements and evaluations. I assign readings and audio-visual materials that demonstrably value the work of community-based social justice groups and their contributions to law creation and enforcement.)
I explain to those in my classes that we will come into partnerships less as experts or saviors, and more as learners and novice collaborators.
In some sense this valorizing of the community partner stands the usual image of lawyering on its head – at least if the context involves low-income or otherwise disadvantaged people. But I do not mind if students are surprised or a little unsettled. I explain that we will be thinking critically about the uses and abuses of professional expertise, and that we will be trying to see and question some of the unspoken assumptions embedded in many of our ideas about the proper relationship between professionals and groups they serve or represent.
The ability to assure good outcomes is not all within my power, or that of the students, however. Placements that yield benefits to community groups and produce good relationships depend also upon the groups and the settings themselves. My experience to date suggests that the following characteristics of partner groups and community settings are predictive of projects that are likely to support achievement of the goals outlined in the previous section.
1. The community group has strong grassroots leadership, serious organizational capacity, and is in active motion on an issue or problem.
2. The group has a good understanding of the needs, capacities and constraints of law students.
3. The project allows students to reclaim and enjoy “lost” skills and connections that they have put aside under the pressure of law school.
4. Law and the legal system play an important role in the problem that the community group is tackling.
5. The problem or issue at hand is one that the student feels passionately about and perceives as a matter of justice.
A NOTE ON OTHER DISCIPLINES BEYOND LAW: You can see that this working list of favorable predictors is shaped in part by my location in a law school. Not all these predictors will apply to undergraduate settings, or to graduate and professional disciplines other than law, although some of them clearly do. For those interested in other disciplines, I offer one additional resource. Several years ago, I helped to create a multidisciplinary program at the University of Tennessee called the Community Partnership Center. The CPC made extensive use of community field projects. Our mission was to link university researchers and teachers with community-based organizations, using the institution’s research capacity to address community-identified problems and to train teachers and students in collaborative and participatory work. At one point the Center received a small grant to promote service learning on campus, as a natural outgrowth of the “service research” effort we had initiated. We decided to use the money to encourage more teachers to embark on high-quality service learning endeavors, and we announced the availability of incentive funds for teachers all over campus, from any and all disciplines, who wanted to begin doing this kind of work with their students in the community. We developed a set of guidelines that included a list of “markers of likely success” at the kind of projects we wanted to see.
To see these guidelines and the associated markers of success, see PDF of “Provisional Guidelines for Service-Learning Grants from CPC Curricular Incentive Fund.
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