In the present university environment, academics are under pressure to deliver both quality research and quality teaching. The relationship between teaching and research is widely seen as important. For some, it is the proximity of teaching to the processes of knowledge creation that gives higher education its ‘higher ’ quality. At the same time, discussions about the emergence of ‘teaching-only’ universities, and concerns that institutional Research Assessment Exercise strategies may actually distance research from undergraduate teaching in particular, reflect an alternative, but also common, view that teaching and research may be – and in practice often are – largely independent activities.
Whatever else it may have achieved, this debate has helped to focus attention on what added value research can bring to the classroom.
Conventionally it has been assumed that, insofar as there is a connection between research and teaching, it lies in the subject expertise of staff. In other words, law teaching will be research-led where teaching and learning reflect and are directly based upon the specialist research interests of the staff delivering the curriculum. Such an approach can leave students in the position of spectators rather than participants. They can admire the scholarship from a distance, but not necessarily gain any deeper understanding of research itself as a process of learning. However, there are methods of enabling under- graduate students to participate in research through learning and teaching which are explicitly research-tutored or research-based (Jenkins et al., 2007: 29). The difference between these is that the former tends to focus on enabling students to engage critically and reflectively with research literature and data, whereas the latter actually enables students to do research and learn through the process of enquiry. Such methods, it is argued, add real value to undergraduate work for both learners and teachers. Learning becomes linked to the lecturer ’s research interests in ways that develop new and original research for the lecturer, while giving students direct experience of research, and increasing their motivation to learn.
A number of UK universities are developing institutional strategies to build the connection between research and undergraduate learning. Some of these are free-standing research initiatives, such as the Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme at Warwick University, which pays undergraduate students to work on research projects with faculty members. In 2006 to 2007, 57 such projects were funded, including two within the law school. Others may operate at the level of a department or course (see Jenkins et al., 2007).
However, there are still relatively few discipline-specific examples in law, aside from the ubiquitous dissertation, of course. In the remainder of this section, through illustrations in Case studies 2 and 3, we focus on two recent UK examples of what can be done.
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A pilot final-year module was launched using a multifaceted case study of a politically and/or legally contentious episode as a means of enabling students to design and evaluate research projects. Each student on the module was required individually to develop a project design, carry out their project and write an essay and reflective account of the process. Each student also received formative peer assessment of their project design during the module. At the end of the module, students came together in teams to devise a strategy for disseminating, to a non-academic audience, part or all of their research output. Each team then produced a strategy document together with any actual or proposed output, such as a press release, draft magazine or newspaper article, or plans for a website.
Work on the formal development and introduction of the module is now continuing.
(Professor Stephen Shute, University of Birmingham)
In 2006/2007 students taking a final-year module in environmental law undertook small group projects exploring the historical context of leading cases in the law of nuisance. The students were sent on field trips around England and Wales with the brief of discovering what inspired the claimants in these cases to bring their suit, including why attempts to settle may have failed, and what the practical outcome of these proceedings was for the communities in which they were situated. These mini-projects were made the subject of group presentations which constituted 30 per cent of the student’s final mark: an essay of 20 per cent and exam of 50 per cent made up the remainder. Subsequently the five projects have all been written up and published, or submitted for publication (see e.g.
Pontin et al., 2007). This approach is being continued in 2007/2008 with a focus on legal issues of climate change.
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Case study 2: Using case studies and teamwork to develop research skills at the University of Birmingham
Case study 3: Doing socio-legal history through environmental law at the University of the West of
England
Evaluation
Case studies 2 and 3, examples of research-based learning in law, are both recent innovations. Even so, they offer some relevant insights into what can be achieved, albeit on specialist options with relatively small student numbers. They show that it is possible to get students actively engaged with research in a way that gives them a different experience of learning about the living law. They show how assessment can be used to support the research-based character of the learning, while also enhancing the students’ transferable skills (e.g. in the use of oral presentations, or writing in different formats and/or for different audiences than the norm). They also suggest a rather different dynamic and division of responsibilities between teacher and learner. As Ben Pontin has observed in correspondence with one of the present authors:
Students are brilliant at gathering ‘raw material’ . . . detective work. However, where students needed input from an academic was in interpreting the significance of empirical findings. Great at treating law as a material object (a field or stately home protected against a polluting factory or sewage works), students struggled with law’s ideas!
There are, of course, a range of practical matters to be considered:
• such courses may be relatively resource-intensive;
• there may be issues about ensuring the sustainability of the research element year on year;
• ethical issues need to be addressed as regards the form of research collaboration and the terms under which undergraduate students are engaged in research;
• research-based learning may create issues about managing student expectations in a relatively unfamiliar learning environment.
However, none of these are insurmountable problems.
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Interrogating practice
Consider a module you are teaching or would like to teach:
• How might you make the learning more research-based?
• What will you do to address the practical design problems you might encounter?