Several interesting recent releases:
1. Miceli, Antonia, From a Distance: Providing Online Academic Support and Bar Exam Preparation to Law Students and Alumni During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 65 St. Louis U. L.J. (2021).
From the abstract:
At its core, an academic support program’s mission is to help students improve their academic performance. But academic support programs also serve a broader purpose. They serve as a bridge between students, faculty, and staff, supporting faculty in their curriculum and course development and nurturing the connections between members of the law school community. They often develop and improve relations with alumni through bar exam preparation efforts. And, sometimes, they are even involved in the recruiting of new students. Through all of these interactions with students, faculty, staff, and alumni, academic support programs foster a sense of community within the law school. This Article introduces the reader to the field of law school academic support and explains the academic support program at SLU Law, both pre- and post-COVID-19. It then focuses on three areas that were the most critical to shifting the SLU Law academic support program online in the wake of the pandemic: (1) building a community with and for our students, (2) translating our physical space into an online presence, and (3) building online courses and adapting our programming while considering new questions of accessibility.
2. Bahadur, Rory D. and Bramble, Catherine, Actively Achieving Greater Racial Equity in the Law School Classroom (forthcoming 2022).
From the abstract:
2020 and 2021 continue to illustrate the pervasiveness of implicit and explicit racism in our society. Less well-acknowledged and recognized is the extent to which Socratic pedagogy also reflects those pervasive racist realities while simultaneously resulting in inferior learning based on a teaching method invented 150+ years ago. Despite this racist and outdated reality, the legal academy has been reluctant to alter the traditional method of teaching. Tangible, empirical evidence obtained from data-driven cognitive learning science research demonstrates that active learning not only improves learning outcomes for all students, but also mitigates the structural effects of racism in the classroom thereby increasing racial equity. Most law professors do not fully understand what active learning entails and underestimate how different an active learning classroom looks from a traditional Socratic class. Once educators explore the evidence in this article supporting active learning as a pedagogical method for increasing greater racial equity in the classroom, understand why most of the rationales frequently cited in support of Socratic teaching are unsupported, and implement the tangible and feasible techniques discussed to facilitate the transition away from Socratic towards active learning, the inertial resistance to the change will be overcome. In so doing, law professors can embrace best teaching practices, experience maximum learning gains for their students, and create classrooms where every student is engaged, included, and supported in a truly equitable learning environment.
(Louis Schulze, FIU Law)
