INNOVATION & ADAPTION
Innovation in education: Adelaide Law School MARGARET CASTLES, MARK GIANCASPRO, CORNELIA KOCH, BETH NOSWORTHY, ANNA OLIJNYK AND MATTHEW STUBBS
The Bulletin asked SA’s three law schools how it is embracing innovation – and how it has adapted to COVID-19 - in delivering education to law students and equipping tomorrow’s lawyers for a rapidly changing future.
T
he 2020 academic year brought unprecedented challenges for students and staff at Adelaide Law School. With effort, goodwill and innovation, the Adelaide Law School community rose to meet the unprecedented difficulties faced by students and staff in 2020. The difficulties faced in the first stage are easy to imagine – when social distancing meant students could no longer gather in large groups for lectures or exams, and then when stay at home restrictions meant that neither staff nor students could attend seminars or the University campus at all, we all moved to online learning. This was no easy task – the benefits of face-to-face interaction for legal education are well understood, and students faced a momentous challenge in adjusting to online learning at the same time as dealing with extraordinary disruptions to every aspect of their lives. Many students and staff discovered that teaching and learning online could work well, and soon we were learning to conduct small group discussions in Zoom breakout rooms, engage in voting and other in-class activities, share our screens to share our work, and make use of live chat to ask (and answer) questions during class. In fact, in some ways we found that teaching and learning online brought distinct advantages – Dr Sylvia Villios and Dr Mark Brady found students more willing to engage than normal in their income tax law courses: ‘it was fantastic. Students were super engaged
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in the chat room, feeding us questions along the way … it was more interactive than face-to-face as the anonymity of the chatroom was a real instigator to students being involved. The students also seemed very appreciative’. A second set of difficulties faced later in the year are perhaps less obvious – when we could transition back to on-campus learning, we had to adapt to social distancing, which kept our students safe, but meant far fewer of them could be in any particular teaching room. Our professional staff team worked miracles reallocating classes around the University to get our students the safest and best options for face-to-face teaching for those who wanted it, while our academics also continued to support remote learning for those whose personal situations meant they were unable to move back into oncampus learning. In the rest of this article, we highlight some of the key successes at Adelaide Law School in adapting and innovating in response to the COVID challenges of 2020. This work led to Adelaide Law School staff receiving four of the University’s 18 Special Commendations – COVID 19 Emergency Teaching Response: Skye Schunke, Ross Savvas and Patrick Wille (Clinics), Anna Olijnyk and Cornelia Koch (Australian Constitutional Law), Mark Giancaspro (Commercial Transactions) & Peter Burdon, Panita Hirunboot, Matthew Stubbs and Corinne Walding (leadership).
LAW CLINICS STILL REPRESENTING THE VULNERABLE AND TEACHING STUDENTS In mid-March 2020, our five legal advice services had just commenced operation for first Semester, with one solicitor supervising six students on site at various free legal services we operate in the Adelaide CBD. When COVID hit, and we were told that the University campus and external sites would close, the Law School Clinic managers and supervisors took a deep collective breath. We decided, rather than closing the doors due to the
lockdown, to shift (in under a week) to operating online legal advice services. Over the next couple of weeks, we worked out how to use Zoom so that students could interview clients and liaise with solicitors in a private “office”, prepared video clips for clients to explain how to use Zoom, and switched to entirely electronic record and file keeping. Although one of our clinics was already running an electronic file system, and other clinics engaged in telephone interviews, we had no experience with an entirely online practice environment, encompassing supervising solicitors, students, and clients spread out across the Adelaide Metro area and beyond. What made this transition both notable and challenging was that our students had only just started their threemonth practical placement in the advice clinics. They had barely begun engaging with interviewing clients or keeping files, and were already well out of their comfort zone, when they had to adapt to a completely new way of relating with clients and working in a legal office. Once the technicalities were sorted, the challenge was to support students who found themselves working in isolation under pressures they had never experienced. Our supervising solicitors, Skye Schunke, Ross Savvas, and Patrick Wille, worked tirelessly to make this all come together, organising files, processes, interviews, and patiently supporting students. Technology is a wonder and enabled us to switch from traditional face to face to remote electronic services overnight. For students, the absence of the human connection – face to face communication in which the non-verbal nuances are clear, and the inability to sit together to debrief with each other and supervisors and be part of the clinic learning community – was a real challenge. To their immense credit, our cohort of 38 students rose to the occasion, whether they were in isolation over the border in Victoria or New South Wales, or working from
