teacher’s comments: Spousal Rape
Campaign
This section collects the various Teacher's Comments that have appeared as pop-up options in the Project Story and Student Reflections segments of this exhibit.
Choosing Projects
Comment on Media
B. Collected comments on Student Reflections
On Group Projects
On Time
On Legslative Advocacy
Public Interest Law Career Planning
Choosing Projects
I remember Jennifer having a real period of ambivalence at the beginning of the semester about what project she should undertake. In many ways, she said, she was attracted to working with the Sexual Assault Crisis Center, which was one of the choices I had listed on the menu of possibilities for student projects in the course that semester. She told the rest of us during an early class discussion that she already had in-depth experience in the movement against violence against women. For instance, she had volunteered as a crisis line counselor at the Sexual Assault Crisis Center in the past, and she had taken a leading role in organizing Take Back the Night activities on campus when she was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee. Her past made a project with the Crisis Center look attractive.
At the same time, Jennifer reported a kind of dread about being drawn back into work on issues of violence against women. The world of battered and abused women can be emotionally draining in the extreme. She knew that it would be easy to become demoralized at the depth of the problems, at how little the “helpers” in the picture are often able to do in a given case, and how elusive the long-term solutions sometimes seem to be. Maybe, she thought, it would be a relief to work on something different for a change. And in any case, Jennifer was not a one-issue person. She certainly had other interests and was aware of other situations where a law student or lawyer might make an important difference.
I didn’t really have much helpful advice to offer at that juncture. On the one hand, I was tempted to urge her to stay with the issue that had meant so much to her in the past. On the other hand, I could understand her reservations, and I thought she certainly deserved a break if she wanted one. Besides, while it sometimes works well for students to build on prior knowledge and to reconnect to their previous lives, it can also be a good thing for them to launch into unknown territory. I have seen field projects where students stumbled with amazement into a client population or an area of law that was brand new to them, but that eventually became an important focus for their career.
Comment on Media
Few law students get much training in how to approach media, although any kind of advocacy that includes appeals to the public must develop a media strategy if it is to be effective. Students of my colleague Steve Wizner at Yale are an exception. Steve includes a unit on media in his class on pro bono and public interest lawyering because he is convinced that knowing how to develop and manage a media strategy is an indispensable skill for public interest lawyers. He was kind enough to share with me some “Public Interest Plans” that students in one of his courses were required to develop, and I noted with interest that a media strategy appeared to be a mandatory component of each plan.
One media-related resource I recommend is a set of books called
How to Tell and Sell Your Story: A Guide to Media for Community
Groups and Other Nonprofit, and How to Tell and Sell
Your Story—Part 2: A Guide to Developing Effective Messages
and Good Stories about Your Work . Both are available from
the Center
for Community Change. The books directly address many nuts
and bolts questions about appropriate strategies—especially
for groups that are not in a position to purchase media time or
space. Indirectly, they also achieve a second goal that may interest
some teachers—that is, giving students a glimpse of how
things look from the perspective of a small grassroots community-based
organization. That glimpse can be helpful for students who have
little prior experience with such groups.
On Group Projects
I share Jennifer’s enthusiasm for the potential benefits
of student projects carried out by teams. A substantial multi-disciplinary
literature has developed around the idea that collaborative environments
often promote better and more useful learning than do the more
individualistic settings and tasks that still dominate legal education
to a remarkable degree, with its lonely test takers continuing
to toil away over end-of-semester bluebooks in a large proportion
of law school classes.
Researchers in many disciplines have pointed out that group projects more accurately mimic real work environments that most students will go into after graduation. They also say that well-planned experiences with group projects expose students to strategies for constructing knowledge and solving problems that better comport with contemporary learning theory and are more likely to help students transfer what they are learning in classrooms today into the many different kinds of knowledge-demanding situations they will confront in the future.
At the same time, team projects pose special challenges that require conscious attention from the teacher and that pose certain risks. In Jennifer’s case, the members of the team were personally compatible, similarly motivated, and worked well together with very little or no troubleshooting from supervisors about their group dynamics. Other students may need more help. Troubles can range from free rider issues, to disagreements about politics or logistics, to personality clashes, or different work styles, family responsibilities, or weekly schedules. Some teams flounder because members are not able to negotiate charged differences like gender, sexual orientation or race. And of course some students have deep experience working in groups and resolving conflicts, while others have practically none.
The teacher can help by providing students with some simple materials about how groups work, either as a general handout for everyone, or as a just-in-time intervention if it appears to be needed. In some cases it may be a good idea to require that groups come up with explicit roles and assignments (whether permanent or rotating), and that these be committed to writing and re-assessed as the project goes forward. The teacher should be conscious and ethical about the impact of his or her own power over students by making clear from the outset how group work will be assessed, and how individuals will be graded.
If group projects are not the norm in a given educational setting, I think it is also a good idea for the teacher to explain why the assignment is structured as a group project. It may sound obvious to say that students benefit from such explanations. Nevertheless, I have been forced to re-learn more often than I would care to admit that my reasons for doing “unusual” things are not always transparent to my students, and that they show greater patience and motivation with my experiments if I let them in on my thinking. Readers may protest that “usual” pedagogies don’t have to go around explaining themselves all the time this way, and that’s true, but fairness to teachers is not the issue here.
Institutional context affects classroom realities in many more
areas than group assignments, of course, but I do think teaching
methods that stress team over individual achievement run up against
some particularly interesting countercurrents and resistances.
One thought-provoking pattern I have observed is that law students
who are accustomed to getting top grades sometimes have the most
difficulty serving as good team members in group projects. Many
law schools, my own included, regularly rank order the student
body from top to bottom on the basis of their cumulative grade
point average, and class rank can translate into significant advantages
in terms of wider options, more money, and greater prestige. In
this kind of environment, high-scoring students may feel that
group projects pose a threat to their status. If they contribute
to the project unstintingly, they may be diluting their own advantage
by “giving away” to others their accumulated but always
vulnerable margin of superiority.
On Time
Time is a huge challenge, not just for students, but also for teachers and for community partners. Like many other good things that have emerged in student projects in my classes, the option Jennifer figured out here emerged by lucky accident. Coordinating simultaneous assignments in two classes will seldom be a viable option. I think it may be the only time I have agreed to such an arrangement, and I am sure I don’t need to lay out all the reasons why in many cases this would not be a good idea.
But the problem of finding adequate time – for students, teachers and community collaborators alike – will be ubiquitous. And teachers should be alert to as many different ways of solving the problem as possible. Jennifer offers some good suggestions here.
On Legislative Advocacy
For all the attention that law schools give to helping students learn how to read statutes closely and how to frame arguments interpreting them, we typically teach very little about the political process by which such legislation comes into being. Beyond an occasional wry nod to the old chestnut about the process of passing a statute being something like the process of making sausage (that is, one is probably better off not knowing too much about how it is done), I recall few moments in my own legal education when classroom discussion focused on this question in any serious way.
Accordingly, I was interested to hear from Jennifer that she was excited by her exposure to law-making in action. Clearly her comments were not the rose-colored-glasses remarks of someone in the first blush of an easy win. After all, the campaign in which she had worked so hard went down to defeat. Nor was hers the reaction of someone with personal political ambitions who was drawn to the atmosphere of wheeling and dealing that is sometimes so palpable in the halls of power. To the contrary, a big part of what she had most enjoyed was watching the members of Solutions gain in self-confidence and civic know-how from their own activities as quintessential “little guys” entering the scene from the margins. Her comments have made me stop and think.
My own experience with legislative activity is not extensive,
and I have seldom felt personally drawn to that arena as a place
where my energies would be well spent. However, my students, and
sometimes their community partners, have recently been drawing
me to pay more attention, and occasionally to become involved.
Jennifer’s recommendations here make me think that I should
consider including a unit on legislative advocacy in my community
fieldwork classes whether or not one of my students is working
on an actual legislative campaign.
It may also be important to expose a wider range of students to this area of practice because of limitations currently imposed on the large majority of practicing poverty lawyers. Congress has affirmatively forbidden lawyers who receive funds from the Legal Services Corporation to engage in most legislative advocacy, thereby increasing the need for pro bono lawyers to contribute their time to this kind of work.
Another factor weighs in the equation as well. The precipitous
decline in voter turnout in the U.S. is now a cause of real concern
to many observers, and startling levels of ignorance about the
political process on the part of many Americans -- especially
the young -- continue to be well documented. These trends have
persuaded many people that we need more and better “civic
education” in America at all levels. Various organizations,
including national and state bar groups, now promote different
kinds of civic education and civic engagement from K-12 through
higher education and in adult basic education classes as well.
These organizations provide resources to teachers and encourage
young people to involve themselves actively in government.
Although law students may stand in need of civic education themselves,
they are also in a position to help teach others about some aspects
of law and the legal system. The civic education movement therefore
opens an interesting opportunity for law student fieldwork. Civic
education projects, often in partnership with state and local
bar associations, can pair students with K-12 teachers and students,
as well as with public-spirited local lawyers. Another student
in one of my classes conducted a project in a local high school
where students carried out a simulation based on U.S. Senate rules.
They wrote bills, moved them through committee and took them to
mock votes on the floor.
Public Interest Law Career Planning
It may be important to point out here that not all students who are interested in carrying out projects in the community while they are in law school are interested in full-time public interest law careers. Even those with a strong passion for a particular justice issue may want to pursue that interest by performing pro bono service while they earn their living in some other way. Plenty of interesting and memorable field projects have been carried out by students who went on to practice law in a private firm with a traditional for-profit orientation.
However, for those students who are interested in exploring a career in some type of public interest law, I could not agree more with Jennifer’s savvy advice here. Students with these interests will greatly enhance their options if they are more pro-active and entrepreneurial in seeking out ways to pursue their interests and identifying who can help them learn the ropes about successful strategies for finding – or creating – public interest work in their area of interest.
