Adjunct faculty contribute much to the vitality of law school experiential courses and clinical education, often comprising the majority of teachers in hybrid clinics, externship seminars, and simulation courses like negotiation or appellate advocacy. While clinical adjuncts bring to campus their mastery and strong commitment to teaching, they often lack the resources and supportive community available to full-time faculty to face the challenges associated with experiential education’s time-intensive, nondirective, and emotionally demanding pedagogy. Many law schools offer their adjuncts orientation and training, and periodically audit their classroom teaching. But we should find additional ways to engage with clinical adjuncts that further their professional growth, encourage collaboration, and show appreciation. Now that we’ve invited these adjuncts into our house, let’s find ways to make them feel at home.
Luckily, the very ways in which law schools use clinical adjuncts itself suggests opportunities for offering them more support. Many experiential courses require a pool of adjuncts to teach multiple sections of the same or aligned courses, for example, trial advocacy or the externship seminar. In those settings, adjuncts form a natural collective for sharing best practices and building community. A similar affinity can be cultivated among adjuncts who teach hybrid clinics and would welcome the opportunity for crossclinic collaboration. The full-time clinical faculty can then take advantage of these “families” of clinical adjuncts to expand the ways to support them in developing as successful teachers and partaking in the rich intellectual life of the broader institution.
The presenters are externship and clinic full-time faculty who recruit, train, and oversee the work of clinical adjuncts, and can offer concrete strategies and materials for better onboarding and integrating adjuncts into the clinical program, and contributing to their professional development as teachers and colleagues.