How Does it Feel to Think Like a Lawyer? Incorporating the Affective Domain in Legal Education
Posted: 10 Jun 2001
Abstract
Legal (and other kinds of) education have been criticised for operating principally in the domain of knowledge and reasoning, and ignoring the effect of feelings, values and attitudes on the learning process. As teachers we tend to locate the content of our programmes in the cognitive domain and restrict ourselves to assessing the mastery of content and technique. Furthermore, we often assume that differences in attainment are due to differences in intellectual capacity only.
However, we may well find that the definitions we use of intellectual ability are artificially restricted by how and what we teach and how and what we assess. There is, moreover, often a reluctance to deal with the unpredictable and individualised issues of feelings, values and attitudes which have an equally important impact on our ability to learn and how we apply our learning.
This paper challenges law teachers to reflect on the importance of an approach to learning which incorporates a wider definition of cognitive abilities and pays attention to the part the affective domain plays in developing critical legal thinkers and proficient, creative practitioners. As a consequence, there are two issues to address: the first is the teaching and learning process itself; the second is the need to review the outcomes of learning, so that students, law schools and the professions are clear what capabilities a student possesses on obtaining a qualification.
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