Integrative Reflective Practice in Canada and Australia: Enhancing Legal Education, Pedagogy, and Professionalism

Abstract

The need to reimagine legal education as a more vibrant, engaging, and rigorous professional learning experience has become a pedagogical imperative for Canadian law schools. A stronger culture of reflective inquiry and professionalism within the legal profession has also become essential. To be better prepared to face a myriad of interconnected and complex challenges, twenty-first century legal professionals need to strengthen their capacity to be systematically and constructively reflective. Law has been slow to recognize the pedagogical value of reflective practice, with the result that it has been under-theorized, under-valued, and under-utilized across the entire professional learning spectrum. This contrasts significantly with a growing body of theoretical, empirical, and applied scholarship recognizing its value in all other professions. To address the lacuna in legal education pedagogy and scholarship, this dissertation explores why and how reflective practice should be cultivated as an important professional competency during law school. Using a multiple case study methodology that included interviews with more than 50 legal educators, I compare and contrast how reflective practice is understood and implemented in Canadian and Australian legal education. Micro, meso, and macro influences favouring reflective practice as a professional competency for both educators and students are discerned. I identify ten types of benefits for students, as well as seven variations of opportunities and catalysts for introducing it and 15 categories of pedagogical methods. A theoretical framework for integrative reflective professionalism is proposed to guide implementation efforts. To explain how different domains or dimensions of reflection (on learning/practice, self, critical, collective, and integrative) can be nurtured, research findings from other professions and US and UK legal education scholarship, coupled with discoveries from the case studies, are presented and curated. A synthesis of the findings informs recommendations for reimagining legal education by implementing a pedagogy of reflection iteratively across the curriculum, including perils and pitfalls to be avoided. The micro, meso and macro factors that might best enable its acceptance as a professional competency in law in Canada are identified. The capacity for disciplined and systematic integrative reflective practice will better equip future legal professionals to provide responsive, visionary, and ethical leadership on a myriad of issues, including access to justice and creating people-centred justice systems, and to respond to the dire reality of a future of unrelenting and disorienting change and increasing challenges to the rule of law.