Learning Skills by Teaching: Community Engagement in “Small Case” Clinics

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza B

Floor: Lobby Level

This session will help attendees consider ways to build community engagement into individual representation clinics. Presenters from Emory Law School and Drake Law School will describe initiatives that help students better understand their clients, improve their advocacy, and confront their own assumptions and biases that interfere with high quality lawyering. The initiatives use an old tactic (“know your rights” presentations) in a new way to make students teachers and learners at the same time, and encourage them to engage on big issues confronting their communities. In addition, the programs involve role-playing and arts-based approaches to instruction- pushing students outside their comfort zones and giving them a different lens into their client’s lives. While the focus of this presentation will be on students learning to represent juvenile clients, the presenters will offer a “template” for how this might work in other kinds of clinics.