Building Students’ Capacity for Creativity

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan D

Floor: Ballroom Level

Fostering creativity can be a path to deepening self-awareness. It promotes authenticity and a keener sense of observation. Many of our students think creativity is not a skill to be learned in law school, or fail to see how creativity contributes to their success, well-being and developing identities as lawyers. Creating an environment that promotes creativity is challenging but can lead to very powerful results. While the legal writing and analysis that we teach in the first year involves some creativity, that creativity is constrained by a certain structure (memos and briefs) and a limited set of examples (legal precedents) as a basis for argument, which can disfavor innovation. Identifying community legal and social justice problems and crafting strategies for solution often requires using different problem-solving structures that law students don’t learn in the first year of law school. How can we help students develop their capacity for creative and innovative problem solving in clinical and experiential courses, to bring to bear on a community lawyering/social justice practice? Organizational psychology research shows that providing certain kinds of structure for problem solving can enhance creativity, particularly in people who either have a high cognitive load or whose personality type leads them to look for rules and structure – both of which describe many law students. We will bring examples of how we have used exercises to increase students’ comfort with less structured tasks, but also provided structured tasks to foster creativity and innovation in our clinics and experiential courses. We’ll try out some exercises in small groups, and you’ll reflect and report back on your experience with each exercise. We hope the participants will walk away with at least one exercise to try in clinics and courses that develop students’ capacity to think and design creatively.