Academic Support professionals are constantly learning. We learn from our students. We learn from data. We learn from failed workshops and successful interventions. We learn from conversations with colleagues, experiments in the classroom, new technologies, and the thousand small adjustments that happen throughout an academic year.
But too often, those lessons stay with us. A workshop worked particularly well, but we don’t write about why. A new orientation approach changes student engagement, but the results remain in a spreadsheet. A colleague develops an innovative bar support strategy, but the idea never makes it beyond their institution.
Academic support is a field built on collaboration and generosity. We certainly share materials, strategies, presentations, and advice with one another, but there is another way we can contribute to the field: scholarship.
When we hear the word “scholarship,” many of us immediately picture a traditional law review article. That is certainly one form of scholarship (and you should absolutely give it a go!), but it is not the only option. Scholarship comes in many forms, such as:
- A law review article
- A blog post
- A conference presentation
- A teaching guide
- A podcast
Many schools are starting to expand their definition of scholarship. Ultimately, the format matters less than the underlying purpose: to generate, examine, organize, and share knowledge that can help others understand or can help improve our own work.
Importantly, our daily work is full of questions worth investigating! Consider the questions that arise each academic year –
- Why do some students seem more willing to engage with ASP resources than others?
- Did students actually benefit from the strategies we taught them?
- How does feedback impact student performance?
- What happens when students receive academic support earlier?
- How does AI change the way students study?
- What interventions during law school most impact bar readiness?
These aren’t just questions for an individual program. They impact every member of every law school community. They are scholarly questions that are arguably farther reaching that others that get multiple articles devoted to them. And academic support professionals are uniquely positioned to answer these questions.
Engaging in scholarship makes your work more visible. Too often, academic support’s work is measured through student outcomes such as individual grades, retention, and bar passage, which are very outside of our control. Scholarship gives us a way to demonstrate the intellectual complexity and institutional value of your work.
It is also a way to elevate the ASP community’s work. ASP is a very collaborative community, and publishing the outcomes of an intervention creates an opportunity for conversation and network building. It allows other programs to build upon your work and share what their own outcomes were with a similar intervention. Scholarship also opens doors to broader conversations. Rather than responding to others’ decisions, ASP can be a part of making recommendations on those decisions through scholarship.
Scholarship does not only have to be about success. Not every program or intervention works. But scholarship can help us share some of the valuable lessons learned through a program that did not produce the expected results. Scholarship creates a mechanism for both individual reflection and collective learning that advances your own program and the field more broadly.
Finally, your scholarship can give students a voice. Students are at the center of ASP work, but their experiences aren’t always represented in the scholarship about legal education. ASP scholars – both current and future – are bringing student experiences into the conversations about assessment, learning styles, professional identity, accommodations, and the bar exam. Scholarship helps law schools better understand what students need and their experience.[1]
Hopefully I’ve sold at least one person on either starting or expanding their scholarship. To those who are starting, my advice is to start small. One reason I hear people avoiding scholarship is that traditional academic publishing feels overwhelming. While I encourage everyone to eventually try that path, you don’t have to start that way.
Try writing a short reflection about a program at your school that you’re proud of.[2] See where that project takes you. A short post can become a conference presentation, then a longer article. Scholarship doesn’t have to start with a fully formed research agenda. Think of something you’re proud of or interested in and see where it goes from there.
You may not think you’re ready. It’s okay not to feel ready. It’s understandably overwhelming to think about writing when you’re already juggling student meetings, workshops, faculty requests, bar program, emails, and whatever other crises arise each day. But, if scholarship is something we do only when everything else is finished, we may never do it.
Instead, we need to treat scholarship as part of our professional work. It is not an extracurricular activity. This might mean setting aside time each week or choosing a conference to present at each year. You might also consider a writing partner, either from your institution or someone from the broader ASP community, to help keep each other accountable. Small, consistent investments produce substantial work over time.
In closing, scholarship doesn’t require every academic support professional to become a traditional legal academic if that’s not your interest. But it does ask us to take our observations seriously and be curious about them. To share what we learn through our curiosity.
Every academic support professional has ideas worth sharing. Every program contains lessons worth examining. Every student interaction can raise questions worth exploring. Our field becomes stronger when we don’t keep the lessons we’ve learned to ourselves. And whatever form it takes – a blog post, a presentation, a dataset, a teaching resource, or a traditional article – scholarship is one of the ways we build the future of ASP.
(Dayna Smith)
[1] With appropriate attention to privacy and research ethics, of course!
[2] The ASP blog and The Learning Curve are great places to submit shorter pieces!
