Working with Students as Partners in a Social Justice-Oriented Law Clinic: Practice and Legacy

The University of Strathclyde law clinic provides free legal assistance to people who are unable to get legal help by any other means. Founded in 2003, its driving purpose was to meet the needs of the community, and not directly the educational needs of students. Today, students of the law clinic continue to be recruited based on a demonstrable desire to give back to their communities and an awareness of societal issues facing the legal sector. This focus on community service, rather than education for its own sake, remains a defining and distinctive feature of this law clinic. It is one that results in an organic form of learning, whereby students and staff learn from each other while working in partnership to achieve a common goal. Students as Partners (“SaP”) is a pedagogy that reconceptualises students from passive consumers of education to agents of their own learning. It focuses on creating a collaborative and equitable learning environment where students actively participate in shaping their learning experience. This is a reciprocal process whereby all participants can contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same way, to the learning process. Although the law clinic was not originally conceived within the parameters of the SaP pedagogy, this is now where it sits. We set out why this is so below, before addressing three key aspects that often arise through working with SaP – power, emotions, and uncertainty – and how these are managed in the context of the clinic. We hope that the model may serve as a case study for other law teachers who are interested in working with students as partners in their own fields, particularly those involved in experiential or practice-based learning.