This is an interactive session featuring a panel of interdisciplinary speakers, including social work and law professors engaged in interdisciplinary experiences in the law school and social work school settings.
The traditional siloed approach to legal practice is evolving as lawyers increasingly work with professionals from other disciplines to develop effective policies and practices. Collaborating with professionals from other disciplines allows lawyers to provide more holistic services to clients in these extraordinary times, while improving the ability of law graduates to serve clients in the current legal and economic environment. Integrating law and social work also increases the capacity of lawyers to engage in social justice movements in a sustainable way by encouraging self-care awareness, advocacy strategies and holistic practices.
This session will explore the who, what, when, where, and how of interdisciplinary experiences. The panelists will provide examples of collaboration between the disciplines of law, social work, clinical psychology, and nursing, with a focus on three settings: an interdisciplinary domestic violence clinic where social work and law students collaborate to serve clients; a pilot exercise focusing on a relevant policy issue that law, social work, and nursing professors embedded into their respective courses; and a mediation in which law students and clinical psychology graduate students have collaborated in several ways, including providing child-informed mediation and developing effective domestic violence screening in mediation practice.
The panelists will address obstacles to implementing interdisciplinary experiences and research, as well as lessons learned for how to overcome such challenges, including specific teaching/supervision strategies and methods for collaborating. In addition, the panelists will propose strategies for how to assess the success of such collaborations.
This will be an interactive presentation, where the audience will be encouraged to engage in discussion regarding incorporating interprofessional learning and researching opportunities at their own institutions.