The Faculty Director of The Aberdeen Law Project, Malcolm Combe, has released a very interesting blog on the topic of academically accrediting law clinic participation.
Malcolm Combe
The text of Malcolm's article:
“I have a presentation to undertake for my PG Certificate in Higher Education this week. I decided to try to put together a Prezi presentation for this. It took far longer than I hoped to do so, perhaps because I am a bit of a Luddite at times, but here is a link to it (I hope).
Needless to say I will be speaking to this. To give you a bit more background, “Clinical Legal Education” is a term that describes the use of pro bono publico student law clinics to further a student’s education, with a somewhat happy by-product of meeting some of the unmet legal need of a society. I have blogged about law clinics before, but this is my first real attempt at putting something together for pedagogical purposes. Academic courses do exist in various institutions, allowing students to gain credits for a degree through clinical activity, but not in my institution. At Aberdeen, the law clinic (known as The Aberdeen Law Project) came first, and it is doing just fine without me fiddling around with it, but then again maybe the students who are working so hard voluntarily should get some benefit over and above a warm, fuzzy feeling inside when they solve someone’s problems. That is what I am studying, i.e. how do you bolt-on or reverse engineer an academic course without upsetting that which is already in place.
As to the presentation, it is fair to say this took me longer than a PowerPoint to put together, but I am all for trying new things. Do you think I have done the format justice? Or should I just not bother with it? I am happy to soldier on, as long as it gets easier.
So a dual purpose blog. Pro bono publico legal advice as a means to legal education and technological innovations to teaching. Comments would be very welcome on both.”
Malcolm's blog, which is well worth subscribing to, is available here.