Sturm, S; Guinier, L --- "Learning from Conflict: Reflections on Teaching about Race and Gender" [2004] LegEdDig 48; (2004) 13(1) Legal Education Digest 22

Learning from Conflict: Reflections on Teaching about Race and Gender

S Sturm & L Guinier

[2004] LegEdDig 48; (2004) 13(1) Legal Education Digest 22

53 J Legal Educ 4, 2003, pp 515-547

The authors have experimented together and individually with building what they call multiracial learning communities in the law school classroom. This term is used to describe a group-learning practice that involves building a classroom community, as well as building the capacities of individuals within that community.

Thinking about gender and race in their teaching prompted them initially to experiment with building multiracial learning communities. Over time, they began to question systematically their approach to teaching more generally. This exploration of law school pedagogy began with a seven-year stint teaching together at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-teaching a seminar called Critical Perspectives in the Law: Race and Gender.

The students in the seminar studied a curriculum that included academic articles, legal cases, poetry, newspaper articles, and other materials. They applied their theoretical work to specific issues such as the First Amendment, affirmative action, and critical lawyering. They met weekly as a group and rotated responsibility among themselves for facilitating the classes. They used a variety of pedagogical styles and methods, from small-group discussion to role-plays to multimedia exercises. They threw themselves into the class.

The authors recognised the need to provide counterweights to their status and authority, while not abdicating their role as teachers. While encouraging students to take greater responsibility for their own learning, they gradually assumed a more active role in developing the syllabus and pushing students to question established categories of race and gender, issues of professionalism, and the conventions of legal analysis. Additional opportunities for interaction with even smaller groups were offered in order to create more occasions for critical thinking and problem solving.

Their teaching practices were organised around a commitment to three ideas: shared power, creative experimentation, and critical reframing. Students were involved in shaping their own learning by creating opportunities for student and faculty collaboration and shared decision making. The participants rotated responsibility for leading sessions, for assigning reading, and, in small seminars, for bringing food. Sharing power fosters positive goal interdependence, by encouraging participants to cooperate in a common project. This mode of evaluation contributes to students’ motivation and reduces the likelihood that stereotype threat will undermine their effective participation and achievement. Positive interdependence requires both resource and goal interdependence. It occurs when a small group needs input from every member to solve a problem and is motivated internally by a common commitment.

Students were also asked to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of different class facilitations and on their peers’ papers and then graded based on how constructive their critique is to the author. Students are encouraged to explore problems using various modes of engagement that reflect different learning styles. The authors have found that alternative formats encourage brainstorming and innovative problem solving. Students must participate actively in their own learning; they cannot sit passively and receive pre-packaged modules of information organisable into compact outline format. Their understanding depends on hard thinking, interacting, and reacting. This process provokes reflection essential to learning and growth.

The importance of developing a ‘critical perspective’ is emphasised, meaning that students’ attention is focused on the assumptions and values that underlie conventional approaches to controversial issues. Students are challenged to use moments of conflict to focus the group’s collective attention. Because the experimental formats encourage many different occasions for interaction, it is easier to push students to question underlying assumptions, to tease out points of agreement, to insist on questioning incomplete analyses, and to use all of these techniques to brainstorm about new paradigms.

Linking issues of race, gender, and class also enables participants to confront the stock stories about lawyers’ roles, leadership, and social change. The student facilitators chose to set the tone for the workspace by beginning with the personal. Students ‘answered’ a series of questions by ‘crossing the line’ for yes or staying on the other side of the line for no, a strategy that creatively de-emphasised the sometimes narcissistic verbosity of law students. Second, the facilitators broke the students up into small groups and asked each group to enter the theoretical vision of one of the authors assigned for the session.

The authors believe that power sharing, experimenting with active learning, and critical reframing are the three crucial principles that underlie their best practices. They are rooted in a democratic sensibility about teaching and learning. By democratic they mean the promotion of interactive and interdependent formats that are participatory and inclusive of diverse voices and styles. They also seek to plant seeds for intellectual and interpersonal growth.

This pedagogical approach also reflects and advances a broader and more dynamic view of lawyers’ roles and relationships than that of the traditional classroom. Teachers model or enact a view of professionalism by the way they structure power and knowledge within the classroom. Moreover, the adversarial professional role is not important in all contexts; it by no means adequately describes the range of roles and positions lawyers now occupy. This process, along with the collaborative work students do with faculty and with each other, also prepares students for a more collaborative relationship between lawyers and clients.

This experience with building multiracial communities has led the authors to reposition themselves in relation to this competitive, uniform, and hierarchical notion of education. This approach to conflict differs in important respects from the role conflict plays in Socratic exchange. The teacher-directed in-class inquiry instructs students in the rituals of adversarial debate, the skills of fashioning an argument, and the techniques designed to persuade an adversary or a decision maker. The possibility of a cold call can heighten students’ attention and keep them involved in the classroom discussion. But the adversarial nature of the student/teacher exchange can also create tension that, for some students, leads to levels of anxiety inconsistent with learning. The debate format also encourages students to think in zero-sum terms, which often converts disagreements into polarising fights.

The authors believe that the principles of power sharing, creative experimentation and critical reframing have enabled them to transform conflict into a tool for learning. As a result of participating in a vital and multiracial learning community, students discover they are not alone. And teachers, too, reap the fruits of working in a collective project.