2007 Workshop on Clinical Legal Education:
Challenging Assumptions
and
Law Clinic Directors Workshop
May 2 - 6, 2007
New Orleans
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We have created a clinical workshop designed to Challenge Assumptions. We spend much of our time as clinical professors encouraging our students to challenge their assumptions – about clients, courts, justice, and even themselves. Sometimes it is difficult for us to remember to challenge our own assumptions – even though we know doing so is fundamental to our success as clinical professors (and probably to our happiness on the job). At this workshop we will challenge how we see the world, how and what we teach, and our hopes and expectations for ourselves as clinical educators.
We will approach our inquiry from three perspectives. Beginning from research and theory, we will explore insights that help to highlight and explain how assumptions (which may take the form of bias) affect the ways we see, understand and experience the world. We will then move to examining how our framing assumptions, many of which we are not aware, affect our expectations, our activities and our beliefs as we teach. Third, we will probe ways that these assumptions permeate our identities as clinical teachers.
In identifying and probing of our basic assumptions, we will explore a number of difficult questions:
What underlies our decisions about client representation? Why are we representing individuals or groups, people living in poverty or those in the middle-class, or clients in our local communities or in communities in other parts of the world?
What assumptions do we make about how our students learn and how we encourage them to challenge their assumptions?
What assumptions do we make about the purposes and nature of advocacy? How do these assumptions shape the decisions we make about advocacy for our clients? How do choices about litigation, legislation, policy change, ADR, and community lawyering of all sorts reflect and shape our views of advocacy?
What beliefs and values do we draw upon in deciding about both the numbers of students in our clinics as well as what criteria we use in selecting these students?
Why and how do we decide whether to increase our supervision load, hire staff attorneys or fellows, increase externship opportunities, and develop simulation courses?
What frameworks guide our decisions about teaching about social justice? What is their source? How are they related to our position in the academy and our relationship to the legal profession?
What principles guide our decisions about teaching our students about lawyering? What is their source? How are they related to our position in the academy and our relationship to the legal profession?
What beliefs are embedded in our decisions about our own careers? What lies behind our approaches to the demands or desires to write, to the urge to teach new clinics or non-clinical courses, to requests to serve the law school and the greater community, to our yearning to spend time with friends and families?
We will seek out expert knowledge to help us in this process – someone who knows about education and about social change. Of course, we also rely on home-grown talent – both more experienced faces and newer ones – to guide us. And, we will be very conscious of our location in New Orleans – learning from the experiences of our colleagues and their clients, responding in some small way to the continuing struggle to emerge from disaster, and enjoying Jazz Fest, the City’s annual music festival.
Please join us as we Challenge Assumptions in New Orleans in May 2007!
~ Planning Committee for AALS Workshop on Clinical Legal Education
Elizabeth B. Cooper, Fordham University, Chair
Thomas F. Geraghty, Northwestern University
Katherine R. Kruse, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Ann C. Shalleck, American University
Hans Sinha, University of Mississippi
Who Should Attend?
This workshop will be of interest to all experience levels of clinicians.
When?
Law Clinic Directors Workshop - The meeting for Clinical Directors will begin with a reception on Wednesday, May 2 at 6:00 p.m. The meeting reconvenes on Thursday, May 3 at 8:45 a.m. continuing until 5:00 p.m. A luncheon will be held at 12:00 noon.
Workshop on Clinical Legal Education - The workshop will begin on Thursday, May 3 with registration at 3:00 p.m. and a reception with posters at 6:30 p.m. The program will include three days of plenary sessions, concurrent sessions and small group discussions. The workshop will conclude at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 6, 2007. In addition to the program sessions, there will be luncheons on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and receptions on Thursday and Friday evenings.
Where?
The workshop sessions and sleeping accommodations will be at the Hilton New Orleans, 2 Poydras at the Mississippi River, New Orleans. Jazz Fest will be held over the same dates as this Workshop, so it is important that you make your hotel reservations now, making allowances for early or late departure dates beyond the workshop dates. The hotels in New Orleans will sell out and that is why we urge you to make reservations now before selection is limited or not available.
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