Teaching Resilience and Self-Care While Doing the Hard Work

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Essex A & B

Floor: Fourth Floor

This session includes two parts. One part will cover the following: Many of our clinics prepare students to do hard work, and not just the hard work of being lawyers, but additionally the hard work of representing clients experiencing trauma and crisis. This can include clients facing deportation, criminal charges, losing custody of children, abuse, and more. And our students’ representation in these matters can result in exposure to trauma. Many students struggle to engage in this work and maintain their own mental health or manage their own experiences of trauma. In some cases, this has meant students turning away from working with clients in crisis or creating barriers that make effectively doing this work impracticable. Through a simulated supervision session, this part will explore how to encourage students to do this work, and simultaneously equip them with the skills to manage the stress and trauma they will face. The goal for the second part of the session is to move trauma-informed pedagogy into an inclusive approach that takes into consideration the life experiences our marginalized and minoritized students, in particular, may bring with them. The objective is to give clinicians tools to teach trauma-informed from an inclusive approach. This interdisciplinary panel will examine connecting these two pedagogical concepts. We will first discuss teaching clinic from a trauma-informed perspective. The panel will then address what it means to teach and to lawyer from a trauma-informed perspective and to teach self-care for our students who come from the communities we serve or who bring life experiences to law school that may mirror those of our clients such that as lawyers, they understand practical resilience as an option to walking away from the legal profession.