Parallel Session 4 - Session A
Flipping IRAC with FORTITUDE Professor Dawn Watkins, University of Sheffield
The research underpinning this paper has taken place in the context of Project FORTITUDE, a UK-based action research project funded by the ERC, which aims to improve children and young people’s (CYP) legal capability.
Originally it seemed that creating a legal capability framework for CYP would be quite straightforward. The plan was to determine the ‘state of the art’ in adult legal capability frameworks, then adapt this to reflect the needs and experiences of this younger population. For reasons which we explain in the paper, this task turned out to be much more complicated than first envisaged. And there have been numerous iterations of the framework, drawing on multiple disciplines and perspectives, including social psychology and critical pedagogy. But at last we think we have the answer. As well as taking a critical approach to pedagogy, we take a critical approach to law and legal education, which includes ‘flipping’ IRAC (issue, rule, application, conclusion), a commonly used method in law-teaching. In the paper, we explain how and why this approach represents an appropriate theoretical underpinning for developing CYP’s legal capability, and we briefly demonstrate how it is being applied to the design and devel- opment of a digital learning intervention. Improve Children’s Legal Knowledge and Skills Through School Tasking: Your Time Starts Now Dr Ali Struthers, Associate Professor, Warwick Law School School Tasking is a university primary outreach project that started life as a small pilot at the University of Warwick in the academic year 2021-22 and has since become a national competition running at thirty-two universities across the UK and Ireland. The project has two principal aims: (i) to introduce pupils from less advantaged backgrounds to the idea of university (and particularly, legal) study, with the objective to widen access to higher education; and (ii) to introduce pupils to the concept and study of law through interactive and engaging, skills-based learning. By drawing on the School Tasking project data, this paper will focus on the second of these aims, with the intention of showing that early legal education may broaden children’s understanding of law and thereby possibly disrupt their preconceptions about what it is, how it works, and who it is for.
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