Snatching Hope & Creativity from the Jaws of a Pandemic

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza B

Floor: Lobby Level

The COVID-19 pandemic caused, and is continuing to cause, a major disruption in legal education, including clinical legal education. Whether it be expansion of capacity to deliver legal advice through remote means, development of hybrid and other flexible teaching strategies, or a total reevaluation of law practice operations, clinicians being required by circumstance to rethink well-trodden methods of practice and pedagogy has led to increased creativity and innovation on a scale seldom seen in legal education. In the years ahead, we anticipate a continuing reevaluation and reinvention by clinicians of what it means to engage in clinical law practice and to educate the next generation of attorneys. In this panel we examine the question of what pedagogical tools we, as clinicians, still need to develop in order to better prepare our students to encounter this changed and changing landscape of legal services. How can we creatively recognize emerging challenges and then formally integrate responses into our clinical pedagogy? We begin with a panel discussion of illustrative examples, and then proceed to small group breakout discussions. Attendees will come away with a more informed sense of potential frameworks to inform their pedagogical choices going forward.