Breaking Assumptions

In my previous post, I discussed how part of the concern we seek to address in this blog relates to how to get students to think critically about the law they learn. From my point of view, teaching to any generation is difficult because the students walk in with assumptions, especially assumptions about power relationships and the nature of society, rooted in their heads. In other words, I have taught many students who assume that because the system does not affect them, nothing is wrong. In other words, it is difficult to deconstruct the relationships of privilege when one benefits from either that privilege or some other privilege that masks the issue. This affects the NetGeners in particular given their tendency to be dependent on technology for information without necessarily inquiring critically about the information they receive.

That is very ephemeral; let me use an example to explain. In teaching first-year Property last year, I found it very difficult to elucidate the subprime mortgage crisis and its attendant class-related concerns. The concern is a straightforward one—because of the economic collapse, housing ownership is now more difficult than ever to obtain. The reasons include the difficulty of accessing credit due to financial institutions being reticent, the lack of creditworthiness among those who have suffered directly because of the crisis, the heightened complexity of even participating in the house-purchasing process, and other factors. This has had enormous local and national impact. A number of the root causes of this stem from the fact that financial speculation lead to ever-increasing patterns or reckless behavior by those who managed the system for their own gain. These arguments have been well-rehearsed.

In lecturing about this, the reactions ranged from from “Huh?!?!” to “That doesn’t really make sense,” to, “Come on, professor; it was their [the poor’s] fault for taking on mortgages that they couldn’t afford.” Admittedly, those who didn’t understand because of the complexity of the situation needed some medium to assist them on their way; similarly, those who don’t intuitively see the dots connecting need a more direct articulating of the situation. Those who merely shift blame seemed to hear a different version of the thesis I articulated above—but in asking further, it became clear they had only heard one side of the debate.

What disturbed me more was that these rejections represented a lack of critical inquiry. What occurred to me was that over 90% of them rented their houses rather than owned them, so it made it difficult to relate to a mortgage crisis. (Notably, the approximate median age of my Property class was somewhere around 25 years old.) The subprime mortgage crisis was a foreign thing to many of them, and they were insulated from it because they lived lives supported by law school loans and they likely saw themselves as immune to the effects (even though the contrary is more likely true).

This left two quite large tasks for me as professor: (1) explaining the subprime mortgage crisis in a way that made sense to those that didn’t get it and (2) encouraging critical facility among my students about what they had heard. I realized that merely lecturing—the form of learning and teaching that worked best for me—would not, by itself, work for the majority of my students. That forced me to the Internet and to my expert colleagues to find a multi-media approach to discussing the issue. Fortunately, I found a short, plain video that explained the crisis straightforwardly. I also asked a friend experienced in dealing with mortgages to explain the process from a practical point of view. These approaches helped foster understanding and relate what they had learned concerning the black-letter law of mortgages to the complexity of the crisis.

Second, it took conversation and effort after the video to force my students to recognize that the video, though produced by a news media outlet, had a point of view. This point was the more difficult one to engage in with my students. The video itself was accepted by some as being correct and some students did not feel the need for further inquiry. And I was anxious to move on to more interesting topics like future interests. And in all honesty, I did not make the most of the discussion that I could have. On reflection, six months later, I am left pondering how to better teach this—or any kind of controversial material that has to do about elucidating power relationships.

My first thought is that attention in our classes has to be given to the idea that there is no such thing as a neutral point of view. Every legal decision and every argument serves some sort of purpose—and having conversations about what those purposes are and who they benefit is an important part of the analysis.

Second, and even more challenging, is the problem of finding ways to encourage students to exercise moral imagination so that they can see the issue from the point of view of those who benefit—or those who suffer—from the particular decision. This seems to be the more difficult hurdle to jump over. It was easy to use illustration to convey the facts, but harder (and some might argue, “inappropriate”) to get students to try to see from the perspective of life experience that they simply have not had. Yet, to “get” power relationship, one must “get” both the motivations for the actions the effects of the actions of the powerful against the powerless. Finally, both the motivations and the moral imagination have to be used to interpret what cases and statutes have to say.

Yet, as I write this, I feel I’m left with more questions than answers. What I’d like to learn is how do you deal with these issues? Or is it even appropriate to raise these issues at all in the law classroom of the twenty-first century? I am open to discussion and suggestions.

In Search of Generation Millenial

Part of learning to teach in the 21st Century is learning as much as you can about your primary audience. It is clear that not only have the cultural references of each generation changed but so have the fundamental characteristics of the people we are trying to reach. So who are these folks? As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is easy to hide behind labels that have been tossed around. It is much more difficult to try and parse out the specifics of the generation and come up with action plans to try and help them learn in a way that best suits their needs.
Luckily, Grace Wigal, director of the College of Law’s Academic Excellence Program, has done just that. Last week, she presented to our faculty a talk designed to help us be more effective guides for generation millennial. During her talk, Grace discussed research regarding what defining characteristics this generation, on the whole, shares. Here is what she discovered.

Generation millenials - growing up with a heavy dose of Nickelodeon and targeted consumerism (like Baby Gap and Sports Illustrated for Kids) - have heard over and over again that they are special. No surprise then that they actually believe it.

• They are confident;
• They are team-oriented;
• They are achievement-goal oriented ;
• They are conventional/conservative;
• They are service-oriented.

Over the next few posts, I want to explore some of the implications for each of these characteristics and discuss the impact that they can have on a professor’s teaching style. I will also share my experiences with teaching this group of kids and how I have seen those characteristics reflected in my own teaching. For me, hearing Grace’s presentation regarding these characteristics, shed light on why my students respond a certain way to different tactics I employ. It’s not surprising: with the average age of WVU law students being 26 years old, we are right in the middle of teaching this generation.

In addition to the internal characteristics of this generation, there also certain external factors that will influence how we teach them. For instance, according to Grace:

• Young adults (18 - 34) have declined from being those most likely to read literature to those least likely;
• Fewer than 40% of high school seniors are spending at least six hours per week on homework;
• Only a quarter of entering college students are reading ready;
• In fact, many college students will not have been required to write a seven-page paper over the entire course of their four year degree.

This can cause huge adjustments for first year law students who are suddenly required to read over a hundred pages of dense law materials in a week while simultaneously writing an 8-10 page paper that analyzes a specific area of the law in rigorous detail their first semester. Never mind the fact that most law schools have a seminar paper requirement to graduate, in which students will have to right an analytically critical paper of publishable quality, usually between 25 – 30 pages long.

Given the huge gap between their level of preparedness and what we expect of them, what is the appropriate institutional response? Is it to simplify (some would say “dumb down”) our curriculum to have our teaching needs meet college students where they are? One of the concerns voiced during the colloquy is that doing this will have long term effects on soon-to-be practicing attorneys who (many feel) will be ill-equipped to perform the complex analysis that clients need.

What about the process of raising students up to the level of academic rigor that we as a law school feel is necessary? The most universal standard for doing that would be by grading students harshly – in essence dis-incentivizing what we feel is sub-standard performance. But then, how does that affect students who have to compete in the job market with other law schools who, many feel employ grade inflation?
This can prove to be a daunting dilemma for professors who want to encourage students to work at an exemplary level yet who don’t want to handicap students by using tougher criteria than at other schools. I have no easy answers.

My own rag-tag method can properly be seen as a paternalistic one. For instance, in my corporate governance seminar, I will have seen versions of my students’ work at least three times before they submit their final draft. That way, I can impart my ideas and standards to them throughout the semester through individual counseling, instead of taking the chance that they will perform to the level I require on their own. However, this method comes at great cost – there is a significant amount of work involved in this one-on-one mentoring and, as a pre-tenured professor, several colleagues have pointed out that it is a cost that will take its toll on my scholarly production (still seen by many as the ultimate yardstick for winning tenure).

So, short of changing the standards of tenure review for professors, doing this work comes with the knowledge that the time I spend with my students will probably not be reflected in my tenure file in a few years time. Still, that is the choice that I have made. Maybe, when it comes closer to tenure I will make a different choice, but for me right now, seeing my students finally perform at the level that will make them exemplary is worth it. However, I’m curious as to choices that other have made. Please feel free to share your thought, comments and suggestions on how to teach excellence to students and what sacrifices will come as a result.

Teaching About the Relationship Between Law and Power in the Internet Age

One of the challenges that we want to take on head-on in this blog is the problem of conversing with students (and with each other as law professors for that matter) about the law as a tool of and manifestation of power. What is it that we’re really after when we want to teach about the authority of law and how it mediates power relationships? How can we best convey the terms of such issues? Or, is this a worthwhile inquiry at all? I think that this issue lies at the heart of this blog project.

As you’ve read from Professor Jena Amerson’s post last week about Teaching at the Speed of Light, our concern revolves around the problem of teaching to Millennials. As she put it, our issues and questions revolve around the problem of “how best to get their attention” in light of their living almost their entire lives in the Internet age.

Yet, there’s a content component to this issue too. There is a lot to be said about communicating content in a way that teaches how to think critically about the nature of the world and the nature of legal relationships. This awareness ideally makes a student conscious of the problems of using legal power and how that power can be usurped and transformed. In a perfect world, law schools would enable a student while learning the law to gain this critical facility. Thus, such students would be conscious of questions like “to whose advantage a particular judicial ruling works?” and “to what ends does a particular opinion or legal principle serve?” and would be able to articulate a view about the nature of the rules she studies.

To me, the question is how do we teach our students about the politics of law (without, of course, making the course about some form of critical theory itself). This, of course, is a question that professors have struggled with during each generation of American legal education. This struggle often reflects the ideology of the professor, the ideological splits present in the Supreme Court and the lower courts at any given moment, and the politics within a given educational institution. To this enduring debate, I am suggesting that there may be a new layer of questions related to how we discuss the politics of law with the Internet generation.

I hope your answers to this question fill this blog. As a first pass answer, let me suggest that the radical democratization of media that the Internet age represents provides us with a new teaching opportunity. One of the defining characteristics of this period is that anyone with a computer and a webcam can contribute to any debate they wish. YouTube and the blogosphere allow anyone with the capability to be an opinion maker. Indeed, Wikipedia, has allowed “the masses” to help with the production of knowledge. This is the world from which our students come; this is the challenge that we face as teachers.

One recent example of this phenomenon can be found concerning the so-called Ground Zero Mosque Controversy. I recently blogged in another forum about the interesting battle of YouTube videos going on between the Ground Zero Mosque Rap!!! and the country video, We’ve Got to Stop the Mosque at Ground Zero. Here, we have two different takes on this controversy. One represents the moneyed propaganda of special interests. The other video represents an apparently grassroots effort. The two attempt to persuade and motivate their audiences to at least think a particular way about their positions. I raise this not to take a position on the controversy, but to draw an analogy: that technology allows a path for anyone, including students to take a stand about current issues and to exercise their critical facilities. Indeed, it may be an apt approach to encouraging their critical and analytical skills at the graduate level..

Our project with this blog is, in part, to comment on our experiment concerning whether the collaborative and democratic construction of knowledge through blogging and social media can effectively function as a teaching tool. The learning forum for our students to this end is a blog we created for our students called Thoughts on Citizens United. In that space, our students, along with others who will contribute, are taking on substantive question of how to construct an understanding of this landmark case. There, we have asked students to contribute thoughtful blog posts regarding Citizens United to build their knowledge about it and how it relates to issues of corporate governance, election law, constitutional law, legal theory, and other legal topics.

Our premise is that by encouraging students to utilize their own agency and creativity in reading and commenting on the world they see, and thereby taking informed public positions (in a way similar to that I saw in the YouTube videos) they can, for themselves, create the knowledge that they seek. We invite you to observe, participate, and comment on this experiment.

(An afterword: related to the issue of democratic access via the Internet is the challenge faced by those people who, due to poverty, do not have basic access to the Internet? Note that these people may largely be people of color. How should we consider their rights to participate in the radical democracy of the 21st century? How are their legal relationships affected by the fact that they are “off the grid.”)