Meeting at-a-Glance

This year’s annual meeting Workshop will focus on connecting with today’s law students. Some of our deepest professional frustrations come from gaps between ourselves and our students — perhaps related to differing levels of technological savvy, misunderstood cultural or historical references, or even clashing expectations or habits — that seem to make teaching and learning more difficult. This all-day Workshop is designed to help close those gaps.

The opening plenary will use expertise from law professors and students, sociology, psychology, and network television to identify some of the challenges of connecting with our students. Themes of generational and consumer identity, globalization, popular culture, student disengagement, and diversity will be introduced in the opening plenary and pursued throughout the day.

The heart of the workshop is the broad choice of concurrent sessions before and after lunch. Many will address specific classroom issues, such as programs on first year, statutory, and professional responsibility courses, classroom crises, and an array of technological developments. Other offerings will address some of our biggest institutional questions, including rankings pressures, globalization issues, and new models for public service.

The Workshop will conclude with a final plenary using the novel and film, The Sweet Hereafter, to showcase issues of lawyering, ethics, and some of the ways that law is situated within popular culture.

A careful reading of the workshop program reveals several ongoing themes: attention to the multiple and complex relationships between students’ experiences at work and in school; careful consideration of educational theories about good teaching practices; and a persistent emphasis on cross-fertilization, such as between clinicians and non-clinicians, between teachers and administrators, and between law and other disciplines.

The Workshop planners are keenly aware that any program on connecting with law students should model high standards for engaging its own participants. Therefore, this Workshop will utilize a variety of effective technologies and presentation formats, situate law in popular culture, including television, film, and literature; reflect the diversity of interests and identities of today’s law students and of today’s law professors, and offer lively and highly skilled presenters. Please join us for this exciting and important program.