Track 1: Establishing and Improving Clinical Teaching Fellowship Programs

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Session Type: AALS Programs

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Fellowship programs
are of great interest--and concern--to the clinical teaching community. Debate
abounds over who these programs are designed to serve (community legal
needs/clients, students, the development of new clinical faculty); whether the
fellowship model is useful only for certain types of legal practice; what makes
an ideal fellowship candidate; and whether the experience helps advance
fellows’ careers.  As we face a “new
normal,” with reductions in enrollment and resources and an uncertain job
market for teachers, it is increasingly urgent that our community find ways to
resolve these tensions.
In this session, we
will briefly frame the issues from our multiple perspectives. Our panelists are
current and former fellows, as well as fellowship supervisors and directors. We
will use these perspectives to launch an interactive discussion about what
strategies might be used to understand the role of and improve fellowship
programs.  Our discussion and break-outs
will explore tensions from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, including
administrators, supervisors, fellows, students, and clients. The issues raised
include:
·Goals
of fellowship programs and consistency of these goals between schools, among a
particular institution’s clinics, and even within individual clinics
·Structure,
training, length of service, and scope of the fellow’s responsibility in the
areas of seminar instruction and field work
·How
fellows can best position themselves to obtain future employment, including
what emphasis should be placed on scholarship, pedagogy, post-graduate degrees,
litigation skills or successes, etc.
We hope that
participants will come away with better understandings of how to navigate the
clinical fellowship landscape.