Assessing change of traditions

Teachers’ insights on a legal education under transformation

Abstract

Legal education is moving away from its tradition towards teaching characterized as student-focused, active, collaborative, and reflective. Many different factors co-create such a teaching environment, including teachers’ understanding of learning and teaching in practice. One example of a legal education that undergoes such change is at the Faculty of Law at the [institution name deleted to maintain the integrity of the review process] in Denmark. However, knowledge is sparse on the transformation of the teaching, and, therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the faculty’s teachers’ views, ambitions, and experiences with teaching practices. A questionnaire was developed and distributed per e-mail to all (768) teachers. The data collection lasted from 3 May 2022 to 23 May 2022. The main findings were that the surveyed teachers mostly had an understanding of learning that favoured student-focused teaching. In addition, case-based teaching is widely applied, but 62.7 per cent of teachers’ ended up talking mostly themselves in practice in the teaching setting despite their ambitions for the distribution of talk between students and teacher. The faculty’s teaching has changed from solely monologic lectures, but there is still some way for the faculty to reach its goals with reforming its legal education.