This session is titled
Re-instilling Wonder: Developing our Students’ Capacity for Curiosity. As
clinicians, we are committed to helping our students become engaged, critical
thinkers. Through our collective experience over many years of clinical
teaching, one critical trait we have observed that leads to nuanced,
client-centered, and sophisticated thinking is the capacity to embrace a
genuine sense of wonder or curiosity about clients, the harm that has come to
them, and the harm that results from opposing parties’ narratives. This has led
us to question: What more can we do to teach curiosity and to rekindle wonder?
How might we do so? What cognitive habits might we introduce to build the
capacity to wonder, and how might law school and the legal profession harm or
undermine it? Those questions are what our session is designed to address.
At the conclusion of this
session, attendees will be able to:
- Begin to define curiosity and wonder;
- Examine why students may lose the capacity to wonder or
be curious while enrolled in law school;
- Understand leading psychological and educational
research on curiosity as a trait and a skill;
- Develop concrete strategies for both the classroom and
supervision to help students develop and exercise their curiosity; and
- Develop strategies for how student capacity for
curiosity can be assessed.