Session 66: Building community in clinics

Abstract

The Legal Advice Centre (LAC) here at John Moores University is open to members of the public, staff and students. It is primarily staffed by students who are supervised by experienced clinic and volunteer solicitors.

The Centre advises on a wide range of legal issues, provides public legal information services and conducts policy and other research. Clinical Legal Education is embedded into the curriculum here at John Moores University at every level of LL.B study.

There is wealth of scholarship around the importance of experiential learning within university law clinics (ULC’s) which enables students to gain practical skills essential for legal practice within a platform which also provides free legal advice for members of the community but little empirical research on the emotional wellbeing of law students undertaking clinical legal education in the UK.

I am particularly interested in what factors contribute to students’ emotional wellbeing, how clinic relationships can be managed, how we develop the competencies of resilience and management of subjective wellbeing within the framework of Clinical Legal Education and what precautionary and protective measures in curriculum design and framework need to be taken into account in order to enable us to support and maintain a wellbeing culture within our Legal Advice Centre.

All our lives were impacted by Covid 19 and we know that these impact have affected our students. At a crucial point in their social development their schooling was disrupted and they were isolated from family and friends.

The Student Academic Experience Survey 2023 looked at some of these impacts.

26% of students told the survey they felt lonely all or most of the time, only 45 % of students told the survey they had a sense of belonging at their university.

The concept of student belonging has received a lot of coverage in recent times, with its links to student success being widely documented. This implies that higher education institutions have a key role to play for through helping to provide a sense of inclusion and community.

Anna Jackson, ‘What have we learnt about student belonging and inclusion?’ HEPI website, 23 May 2022.

We believe that our clinic programme builds this community and sense of belonging by:

• Group work – including cross faculty work and outreach projects
• Careers and Professionals events – includes networking events, professional visitors and local engagement so students feel a sense of belonging in the professional community both whilst at university and once they enter the professional services world.
• Class clients
• Teams
• Use of group Whatsapp for clinic management

Could we be more intentional about this ? Can we do more ?

Ideas:

• working alongside LJMU Start-up Hub to promote wider engagement of LJMU students and part of the wider student community.
• Other projects with the business school and other faculties within LJMU
• Opening advisory hubs in the community to increase outside engagement.

Does it matter?

Students will attend to talk about their own personal experiences of clinic life and offer examples and suggestions for continued improvement to build on community.