This paper focuses on the student-lawyer supervisory relationship in Canadian clinical legal clinics. The authors argue that students rely on their clinic supervisor’s approach to practice as a valid (and often primary construction) of the meaning of legal practice. These relationships can play a crucial role in the formation of students’ professional identity. Clinic supervisors approach their teaching and learning roles in diverse ways. Supervisors hold a unique position within legal clinics and legal education more generally. There is an inherently unequal power relationship between student and teacher. However, by allowing space to bring in a critical pedagogical approach to questioning institutions and practices, supervisors allow students to become engaged citizens. Although critical pedagogy may seem like an academic exercise with little connection to the clinical world, its origins are in applied and community-engaged approaches to education around the world both inside and outside formal education institutions.
This paper provides recommendations on structuring student supervision in a pedagogically sound manner that maintains a commitment to critical and socially progressive advocacy in the clinical setting. These recommendations include student assessment, acknowledging the role of community, institution, and power, self-directed learning, integration with academic staff/ institution, seminars, mandatory community development work, and simulations.
Gemma Smyth & Marion Overholt, “Framing Supervisory Relationships in Clinical Law: the Role of Critical Pedagogy” (2014) 23:4 J L & Soc Pol’y 62.
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