Legal Commentary

Last week I promised a further post about what I thought online teaching might be good for. I thought I'd start with explaining what I hoped to accomplish with my foray into an online webinar this academic year.

As I've mentioned, I'm on leave this year and nowhere near Florida. I was worried, however, that going on leave would put my grad students, most particularly an incoming grad student, in an unfortunate academic limbo. And while I realize doing things like that are an important way to maintain the illusion that I, as a faculty member, have the power of life and death over people, I decided it was probably best to figure out a way to stay in touch with my students and forego the pleasures of that illusion just this once. So partly, the webinar is for that.

Partly, the webinar is because I think it's important for grad students to experiment with different ways of teaching and learning. Who knows what we'll be doing to teach in fifteen years (on my bad days I wonder if "teaching" will still exist, but it's early yet, so I'm still maintaining its a good day)?  I hardly claim to be the most technically advanced teacher on the planet, but I like to think that I at least model a willingness to experiment and try new approaches. So partly, the webinar is for that.

Partly, the webinar is because I think the program I am part of needs to do more to create a communities, or working groups, of grad students in different stages in their careers and different programs. Other grad programs do have longstanding seminars that absorb new students and provide an academic home for students along their academic careers. For a variety of structural reasons, my program does not, with one exception. And so this seemed to be a possible way to do that.

Finally, I did this because I wanted to find ways to reach out to other students, and scholars, at different schools who were working on things that related to my work and my students' work. There's much to be said for exposing students (and being exposed as faculty) to other people's ideas, and there's much to be said in this time of academic cutbacks for finding ways to create working groups that cross university boundaries. In any given year, I can never guarantee I'll be able to admit a student to do legal or constitutional history with me, and I can almost certainly guarantee that I won't be able to admit two. But that creates a cohort problem, isolated students who have no one to talk to but a single professor may get lots of attention (maybe not, but let's assume that I am a conscientious grad advisor), but that can be too intense and not very productive. One way to solve that, it seems to me, is to develop virtual programs or quasi-programs that encourage students admitted to different schools to interact through webinars and workgroups across the course of their grad careers.

So those were my ideas. How do they stack up against reality, and how might they be translated to the law school setting, since you are mostly law profs and have a very different relationship to your students and their training? (I do appreciate that those of you working in joint degree or interdisciplinary programs do have a more direct interest in the types of graduate education I am talking about here).

Certainly it does seem to work as a way of establishing a subject based writing and research seminar that could be a place to bring different cohorts of grad students together as a community. As I mentioned in my last post, I think it's important that the focus of the group be very narrow--this works as a seminar on constitutional history that looks at very precise issues of interest to the students. It would not, I don't think, work long as a site for all grad students in US history or any student doing modern (ie, post 1800) history or as a place for a student who is vaguely interested in legal history. Any seminar that general will have problems, but a seminar that general and this remote would be very difficult to keep going.

A long term seminar like that would, ideally, last for years, until there were no more grad students with an interest in the topic in the program. So long as there were ways to mix up new readings, dissertation chapters, and perhaps the occasional article draft or conference presentation, I think it would be possible to generate interest and keep people focused and engaged.

But I also think you could use this format for shorter term projects, for a working group that had a time table to produce a particular report or prepare a case or brief, or as part of the process of setting up a mini-conference. Here, I think you'd need to do some mixing and matching. Probably the process should begin with a face to face session so people meet, lay out ideas, and then, perhaps form breakout groups.  Once the structure was in place, you could use the online program for monthly sessions, either of subgroups or (if the initial group was small) the whole group. I'd recommend not using an online resource for more than an hour at time. But  an hour long session would allow for one or two presentations of work in progress and discussions about the work group's project or the conference subject more generally. And it would be a way to keep people on track towards completion of the project or towards a final, second conference at year end.

That might be something that law schools would find fruitful. Certainly clinical work groups could use this as a way to coordinate projects with law firms, or other schools, or alums. But research groups with a particualr focus--environmental justice, the mortgage crisis, whatever--might also find this a handy way to stay in touch and share research as part of a build up to a final conference or a CLE presentation or a publication.

And finally, I think it might be a way for us all to break down some institutional and disciplinary boundaries and try to bring students and faculty together to work on areas of mutual interest and perhaps create virtual--cross institution--grad programs. Obviously, there are logistical problems (the subject of the next installment!), and those maybe impossible to overcome, since territorality increases, in my experience, in times of scarcity (and I have been blessed with a fair amount of experience with times of scarcity in academics). 

But all the hassles, headaches, and weirdnesses of webinars might be worth it if we could use the processes available to try to create some networks and work groups that changed the ways in which we conceived of graduate education. It might be a way to give law students who crave a more academic approach a way of getting that in their third years, without altering the basic professional format of law school or penalizing law schools that are not associated with universities that have extensive graduate offerings. It might be a way to bring law professors who want to do interdisciplinary work in contact with people who have advanced training in particular fields. Likewise, it would be a way for historians (or anyone) with an interest in law but no background to connect their research and teaching to law schools. 

All that hybridity, of course, might shake up the systems of academic rankings and models of academic apprenticeship that we currently rely on. I leave it to you all to decide if that's a good or a bad thing.