Fitzsimmons, D; Kozlina, S; Vines, P --- "Optimising the First Year Experience in Law: The Law Peer Tutor Program at the University of New South Wales" [2007] LegEdDig 16; (2007) 15(1) Legal Education Digest 43

Optimising the First Year Experience in Law: The Law Peer Tutor Program at the University of New South Wales

D Fitzsimmons, S Kozlina & P Vines

[2007] LegEdDig 16; (2007) 15(1) Legal Education Digest 43

16 Legal Educ Rev 1 & 2, 2006, pp 99–124

Struggle is the common experience of first year students undertaking a degree in law in tertiary education. This struggle takes many forms: the newly found freedoms for those accomplished students recently released from high school; the need to ‘re-think’ and transfer skills for graduate or mature aged students; or the ‘burning both ends’ struggle for part-time students balancing paid work with study. So, studying first year law is difficult, and not just because of the challenging nature of the subject matter.

The UNSW [University of New South Wales] Law School builds its foundations of teaching quite clearly on notions of social justice both in terms of content and teaching. The program draws heavily on ideas from a broad spectrum of theories of liberatory education. In particular, Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire’s dialogical approach to learning is significant to all peer-to-peer learning as it is based on mutual respect, and rejects the more traditional notions that students as ‘learners’ are ‘empty vessels’ filled by the ‘knower’.

The Law Peer Tutors then adopt Freire’s notion that they must act with younger students, rather than for or on behalf of them. By working with students, they are more able to empower them in quite specific and material ways.

Traditionally, the Peer Tutor Mentor has played an active role in suggesting techniques and methods that the Law Peer Tutors can use to facilitate the students in overcoming challenges of learning new skills such as reading cases, legal writing and how to apply legal concepts in actual cases. The Mentor also invites members from other units such as Counselling to talk with Law Peer Tutors.

Responses from students indicate that one of the most important factors which influence their learning is the quality of the Law Peer Tutors. So, there are a number of things that we look for when appointing students as Law Peer Tutors. Generally, they are recruited from law students in their final or penultimate year of study. Traditionally, we have required students to have a good level of achievement at law school (a credit average or higher) although there has been a strong emphasis on not merely selecting students with outstanding academic records, but those who are able to demonstrate some form of empathy. Students who have a broad range of experiences and are involved in social or cultural activities have proved, not surprisingly, to be some of our most effective and popular peer tutors. Frequently, Law Peer Tutors continue from year to year. We encourage this continuation so that turnover is minimal, as often it takes at least one semester to learn the ropes and it is more valuable for the Law Peer Tutors themselves to pass on knowledge rather than the Convenor or Mentor of the program.

Funding for the Program is shared by The Learning Centre, a specialist unit of UNSW dedicated to assisting students in improving their academic skills, and the Law School. Law Peer Tutors are paid at the rate of a Level 5 Research Assistant.

A predominant challenge for any student help program, as revealed in previous literature, is that there is not a single set of ‘first year student problems’ nor a single group of students. This challenge can be met by recognising these problems and helping students to devise strategies to understand both the content of first year law and how to study in a new environment.

Confidence was being achieved through the ability to participate directly in the learning process, in ways not always possible in the classroom. Networks amongst students were being established through a shared notion of collaboration and care amongst those in the peer groups. Academic achievement was the most problematic issue and saw a conflict between the expectations of Law Peer Tutors and First Year students — something that came to be labelled ‘tolerating uncertainty’.

Much educational research has posited the benefits of learning through participation, but this is often a Catch 22 situation.

This aspect of the program focuses on the student, their motivations, backgrounds and expectations, as students must be able to confidently see themselves as law students. Activities take into account these varied motivations and are designed to be interactive, so that students can learn and practice skills of academic literacy specific to law: speaking, reading, writing, researching. Such activities include: the kind of questions you ask when thinking like a lawyer, and use of current journals or newspaper articles to focus on what makes something a legal issue. Here one of the most important tasks for the Law Peer Tutors is to build on Paulo Freire’s comment that we should focus on ‘problem posing’ before ‘problem solving’. One of the main difficulties with problem solving is that the boundaries of what can be asked are already set, so a student rarely has to question what is relevant except in very narrow terms. Critical thinking should be about questioning the context, as well as the content of an issue.

A strength of our program, like many similar programs, is its voluntary nature. If students self-select, they are more likely to be prepared to own their own learning, rather than see the program as some kind of remedial work. Additionally, self-selection also indicates a willingness to work on new acquaintances. More than 70 per cent of students in the 2002 survey indicated that it helped them to make friends and to feel that they belonged ‘socially’ in the Law School. It appears then that these connections are vital to the resilience of students, and can help them when the pressure of assignments becomes intense towards the end of semester.

Pleasingly, data consistently shows that the program met the majority (83 per cent) of participants’ expectations.

The program is designed to encourage students to care about their work and see how it makes sense in their everyday lives.

The Law Peer Tutors Handbook is an example of this ongoing mentoring and collaboration, and provides both a common foundation for the work, but also gives Law Peer Tutors and students a material basis for activities.

Feedback from surveys shows that significantly more women than men take up the opportunity to participate in the program, generally at a ratio of 2:1. These figures appear to point to the well researched statement that women are more likely to seek help with learning than are men. Additionally, the age of participants is roughly 19–20 years of age, apart from the steady number of graduate students who often show the greatest determination to ask questions. As research into mature age students surveyed indicates, their choice is guided more by their experience of life, so it is a more considered choice, rather than HSC entry students whose motivation is much more influenced by exam marks, acquiring cultural capital associated with studying law, and bending to pressure from family and friends. Perhaps one of the most significant figures is the response to the question: what languages other than English were spoken at home? Data has consistently revealed that more than 80 per cent of students in the program spoke languages other than English at home. This figure is also mirrored by the Law Peer Tutors themselves who more often than not were not first language speakers of English.

In identifying the content of peer group meetings, 78 per cent of participants noted that the groups engaged in both general conversation and detailed analysis of cases and material. A slightly smaller proportion of peer groups (74 per cent) engaged in legal problem solving techniques, while 59 per cent of peer groups engaged in the explanation of English and legal words and 56 per cent of groups discussed essay writing techniques. These figures indicate a general tendency about what kinds of activities occurred, rather than a strict format which was followed each week.

By adopting this kind of flexibility, Law Peer Tutors are able to demonstrate an environment of caring about students and the ideas they hold.

That studying law is a struggle is endorsed by all research, and recent work by the Learning Centre at UNSW has shown that resilience should be seen as one of the essential ingredients for student success. Here the Law Peer tutors can play a crucial role because they have the time to both listen deeply and then to suggest some specific strategies for the students in their group.

Generally, a good measure of the program’s success is the goodwill generated by word of mouth. Here the recommendations of students are crucial. The majority of participants would recommend the Peer Tutor Program to other first year students. This figure has remained relatively constant: more than 65 per cent of students would ‘highly recommend’ the Program, and around 25 per cent would moderately recommend the Program. Indeed, a number of students who were participants in the program have then become Law Peer Tutors in subsequent years, which is perhaps the most enduring recommendation of the effectiveness of the program.

Comments showed that students appreciated the down to earth explanations of complex legal concepts which matched their current level of knowledge. Also the students noted the value of talking about what was expected in terms of legal assignments as well as how to do them. Significantly, a number of students recognised the access and equity basis of the program (for example for international students and those of Non English Speaking Background), but they also mentioned that it was a program that would be useful for all students. Some responses raise the further issue that although the program is successfully shaking off its status as being for student with a ‘deficit’, it is perhaps now being seen as a ‘mark generating machine’ by students, particularly those familiar with private coaching and tutoring programs aimed at ambitious school children. This is a tendency that needs to be watched carefully.

The tendency of first year law students seems to focus unswervingly on ‘the answer’ — that mythical place of correctness, exactitude and certainty, where everything suddenly becomes clear.

One of the aims of UNSW’s first year law course is to delay that trigger-response in order to allow the student to understand an issue more deeply and critically.

Applied to the Peer Tutor Program, the idea of ‘tolerating uncertainty’ means not just withholding conclusions for a short time but also that it is okay for students not to understand everything straight away. Students also get to see the doubt and confusion of other students, which might lead to the realisation that ‘I am not alone’ in the struggle to understand the course.

However, this notion of ‘tolerating uncertainty’ was not always readily appreciated by First Year students and goes to the heart of the normative and philosophical underpinnings of the Law Peer Tutor Program. The clash was between a program that focused on improving the transition to studying law at university and the First Year student need to perform well in their assignments. Obviously, these two aims are not necessarily contradictory however they very easily can be and this was highlighted in the experiences of some of our First Year students and Peer Tutors.

One of the challenges of the program is how to prepare our Law Peer Tutors to handle these conflicting expectations. One tendency has always been to ‘give in’ and provide the answers the students want. Strategies to deal with this include a heavy emphasis in training on the specific, and in some ways, limited role Law Peer Tutors have in conveying academic content to their First Year students. Another technique can be to conduct role plays to practice how to deal with demands by students for that type of assistance.

The following results manifest the extent to which the Program has achieved its outcomes of assisting first year students with studying, university life, assignments and learning skills. Most participants found that the Program assisted either to ‘a great extent’ (44 per cent) or to a ‘moderate extent’ (37 per cent) with studying in general. Of the remaining students, 11 per cent found that it helped only to a ‘minor extent’. In addition, it reveals the extent to which the program may have assisted in specific areas of legal study in which first year students may require extra assistance. The majority (48 per cent) of participants indicated that it assisted in studying law to ‘a great extent’, with a further 44 per cent indicating that it assisted to a ‘moderate extent’. As a consequence, in reference to written assignments, the majority of students (52 per cent) indicated that the program assisted with law assignments to ‘a great extent’. A further 30 per cent of participants claimed that it helped to cope with law assignments to a ‘moderate extent’. More specifically, in terms of case reading skills, responses consistently show that almost two-thirds of participants indicated that the program helped them to ‘a great extent’. In addition, 30 per cent of participants found that it helped them to a ‘moderate extent’ with case reading.

Lastly, responses of students also show the extent to which the Program may have helped the understanding of law in less immediate terms. For example, adapting to the general demands of university life was also considered a significant feature by the majority of participants (50 per cent) who found that the Program assisted to ‘a moderate extent’ to cope with the demands of university life. Of the remaining participants, 23 per cent found that the Program helped to a ‘minor extent’, 15 per cent to ‘a great extent’. Additionally, the acquisition of and familiarisation with new learning skills is also crucial to learning the law. Indeed, the majority of participants found that the program helped either to a ‘great extent’ (52 per cent) or ‘a moderate extent’ (41 per cent) in putting into practice these learning skills.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the feedback provided over the years has been the questioning of the extent to which the program assisted in English for law. The majority of participants (41 per cent) indicated that the Program assisted in English for law to a ‘moderate extent’. The remaining students suggested that the Program assisted to only a ‘minor extent’ (26 per cent), to a ‘great extent’ (18 per cent), and ‘not at all’ (15 per cent) in coping with English for law.

Although the university provides other resources for these students, the aims of our program quite obviously extend to dealing with this type of problem. Several possible strategies have been considered over time. One was to ‘stream’ the groups, such that students with specific English language difficulties would be placed together. However, one significant limitation to this approach was that it denied the opportunity to see and hear law being discussed in non-academic terms to the very students who would most benefit from the exposure. Another strategy was to pay no attention at all to the language capabilities of students when allocating them to groups. In this way, the beneficial opportunities mentioned above might be obtained. One drawback was a feeling by some students in those groups that students with limited English skills did not participate in or contribute to the group.

Again, the solution comes back to the skills of the Law Peer Tutor to deal with these conflicting skills and expectations. The challenge of providing both a generalist and targeted program at the same time is one of the on-going challenges we face. The goodwill and sincerity of our students and tutors nearly always ensures that an effective peer group is established, however this issue certainly requires greater thought and research, particularly in working out what are the limits to what we can do and achieve.

The majority of participants (55 per cent) felt that the Program had improved their understanding of law to ‘a great extent’. A further 37 per cent indicated that their understanding of law had been improved to a ‘moderate extent’.

Intimately connected to a better understanding of law is the assumption that this will translate into marks gained. It is difficult to go beyond just a pragmatic assumption at this point, yet responses did suggest some link. More than 30 per cent of participants felt that the Program helped to improve their law marks to a ‘great extent’. In addition, the majority of students (52 per cent) indicated that the program assisted in improving their marks in law to a ‘moderate extent’.

The remaining 15 per cent indicated that it assisted but only to a ‘minor extent’. Admittedly, the question of what influences a shift in marks is fundamentally overdetermined, but the important point here is that the students have attributed this increase to their participation in the program.

As for the long-term or practical impacts, the majority of participants (89 per cent) felt that the peer tutor meetings helped them to acquire tools that they could later use themselves. In addition, first year law studies have recently been diminished by an increased über-competitiveness expressed by first year law students, as a result of the pressures of clerkship and later career opportunities; this appears to be a wholly inevitable consequence of recent pressures on higher education funding. Here too, according to a number of responses, the Law Peer Tutors have been a calming influence in contextualising law and the culture which surrounds it.

So, if the aim of the UNSW Law School is to promote social justice as both content and process, then the Law Peer Tutor program plays a crucial role in encouraging and putting into practice a collaborative and critical approach to the study of law, which helps to create a sustainable community of learners. Secondly, we have benefited from the consistency of convenors of the program — this has enabled the program to create a tradition without needing to be reinvented. Although there are always struggles for money, the success of the program means that they are less brutal.

Thirdly, the training and ongoing mentoring of Law Peer tutors is crucial. Fourthly, the program must have a strong philosophical basis, even if this is only marginally obvious in the everyday running of the program. However, this philosophy must fit in with the context of the overall law program, otherwise it will seem pointless to the students who learn one thing in a peer group meeting, and then are expected to do the opposite in the classroom. Fifthly, paying the Law Peer Tutors recognises the value of their work, and particularly in the context of today’s market economy, it offers a form of credibility which volunteer programs can lack in the eyes of the student as ‘consumer’. Sixthly, another challenge is to promote awareness of cultural difference and issues of equity and access. Seventhly, a vital part of the Program is that Law Peer Tutors know the very clear difference between ‘lecturing’ and ‘tutoring’ or ‘facilitating’. As noted, knowing and acting on this distinction is a key part of early training.

Finally, these kinds of programs offer mutual benefits; the adage that teaching is the best way to learn something certainly holds true for the Law Peer Tutors. This outcome perhaps should be the focus of further study.