Anti-Bias Teaching and Supervision: Practices That Foster Respect and Belonging for Students in Clinics and Externships (Part II)

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Union Square 15&16

Floor: Fourth Floor

As clinical law faculty, some of us struggle with how to ensure that all the students in our courses and programs feel accepted and respected in our classrooms and in the field, particularly in this age of polarization. Many of us have seen an uptick in applications from historically underrepresented students. To help develop the next generation of lawyer leaders, we need to be willing to talk about hard issues such as racism, implicit bias, and privilege with our students. Many of our students of color encounter incidents of bias that are minimized or overlooked altogether by their supervisors, judges, or even their professors. As teachers we have the capacity both to better prepare our students of color for the gross inequities that they may experience in their field placements, clinical settings, and ultimately in practice, and also the opportunity to raise the consciousness of all of our students who will unanimously, though not uniformly, walk through aspects of their lives with a degree of privilege.
Carmia Caesar will begin this session by talking about her current work focusing on the dearth of scholarship from the perspective of the students who are most often the targets of bias in our very white, male, heteronormative profession. This framework shifts the focus of the roundtable to give more voice to the experiences of our students of color. The presenters of this session are working closely with a companion session entitled: Anti-Bias Teaching and Supervision: Practices that Foster Respect and Belonging for Students in Clinics and Externships (Part I). Part I will be primarily a teaching/learning session that sets up the framework for an interactive roundtable discussion in this session, Part II. Attendees are not required to attend both sessions, but they will inform each other.