Demographic changes projected in the United
States ensure a diversifying population for generations to come. These changes
pose significant challenges for law schools whose mission is to graduate
students who can become effective advocates for this diversifying population to
ensure that they have meaningful access to justice. To meet this ever expanding
need, the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to
the Bar (“ABA”), and the Association of American Law Schools (“AALS”) have made
a concerted effort to encourage their member law schools to demonstrate that
they are incorporating specific learning outcomes in their curricula to ensure
their students achieve some measure of cultural competency to prepare them for
careers serving an ethnically and culturally diverse population.
This Discussion Group will join a diverse
group of legal educators from around the U.S. who have engaged in developing
learning outcomes to meet the objectives of the ABA and AALS with respect to
cultural competency. Each discussion participant will present a learning
outcome they developed at their law school and discuss how they mapped the
achievement of that outcome in their law school’s curriculum. Other
participants from a call for participants would also be welcome to join the
discussion. Individual participants may
elect to publish scholarly papers related to their participation in the
discussion.
The Discussion Group Organizers will moderate
a discussion among the group that will include the following topics:
1. What
learning outcomes has your law school developed to meet the objective of ensuring students’ cultural competency?
2. How
has your law school determined it has met the objectives of its cultural competency learning outcomes?
3. What
specific ways has your law school implemented cultural competency learning outcomes?
4. How has your law school assessed
cultural competency learning outcomes?