Teaching in the Service of Community

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Session Type: Workshop Programs

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This session will focus mainly on the interplay between two core objectives of community lawyering clinics, teaching law students, and promoting community accountability, which sometimes are complementary and other times seem like competing goals. We will discuss the complexities of working in a clinic that is both deeply committed to being responsive to a particular community‘s expressed interests and to helping our students thrive as legal professionals. Specifically, at times, we have found that our efforts to encourage students’ self-directedness, agency, and autonomy can be in tension with building community capacity and decision-making power. In this session, after brief introductory remarks by our clinical faculty, two of our community partners will reflect on their experiences of working with our students, specifically, our clinic’s effort to support them in developing a campaign aimed at bringing back their elders, many of whom have been incarcerated for over five decades.

Then, in small breakout groups, we will ask participants to discuss the opportunities and tensions they have encountered supervising students as they engage in community-driven work in clinics, and then share the practices/policies they have implemented to ensure a meaningful experience for students and long-lasting and deep community partnerships. We will reconvene together as a whole group for some final harvesting of participants’ learnings and takeaways.