Projects
"Flat Lecturer" Project
Creativity is a crucial skill for legal practice. In my teaching, I have sought to encourage students to explore their creative sides through assessments that have visual elements and that communicate legal information for generalist audiences.
When the 2021 COVID-19 Lockdown hit, my interest in creativity and law took a different turn. A colleague, Dr Donna McNamara, and I noticed that our Law Students were burnt out in the lead-up to midsemester break. We devised a wellbeing activity, a photography Contest based on the Children’s book Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown (that we called a “Flat Lecturer” project), as a gateway to fostering connection and a positive learning environment online. Since the 1990s, Flat Stanley Projects have been used in primary and high schools as a way for teachers to connect with their students and support a learning exercise. It involves taking a laminated or paper version of the teacher (often their cartoon avatar) on an adventure, typically as part of a literacy project. As we wanted our law students to have a little bit of fun to lift the monotony of Lockdown rather than meet a particular learning outcome, we decided to combine our Flat Stanley Project with a Photography Contest.
Ultimately, we ran the first Flat Stanley project run amongst Law Students in Australia. The project materials can be viewed here. We then presented on the implications of the project for teaching in law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2022 (see slides and presentation). A selection of the winning competition entries can be viewed below.
Curricular Justice Project
I am passionate about curricular justice and fostering a student learning environment that both centres social justice and supports critical thinking about law and its role in society. I wish to equip students to understand law as something more than just legal rules, and to contribute to a more inclusive and just legal system.
I am proud to have co-developed a Curricular Justice Model (CJM) for a whole-of-program curriculum revision in Law that aligns with cultural responsiveness as a graduate attribute. I presented on this Model’s development in November 2021 at Waikato University. With my colleagues A/Prof Amy Maguire, A/Prof Kevin Sobel-Read and Dr Samuel Woldemariam, I am mapping this model against the LLB and JD programs with a view to reforms in core courses from 2024. Our Curricular Justice Project team was awarded a Reconciliation Award from the University of Newcastle in June 2023 for this work.
In my role as a course coordinator, I have also sought to embed curricular justice into my elective law courses. In 2022, I introduced a Critical Approaches to Copyright Module in my Intellectual Property Law course that focused on building critical thinking skills about the relationship between law and First Nations and other vulnerable and marginalised peoples. My qualitative research with students supports that students are highly receptive to learning about racial justice (even in courses not primarily about race) and studying law through non-traditional texts such as artworks.