Dr Donna Buckingham - Tertiary Teaching Excellence Teaching Profile

Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Otago

Donna has taught the first year law course for 18 years to groups of between 500 and 600 students. Amongst her peers she has a reputation as an outstanding teacher that is founded on her roles as manager and lead teacher in LAWS 101. As evidenced in many testimonials, Donna has embraced technology by developing on-line statutory interpretation problems which students can use in their own time to further advance their skills. Donna has also been recognised for her outstanding work in 2005 by receiving the Otago University Students Association Teaching Award.

My commitment to the learning community

Each year, as I stand before my LAWS 101 class, I am one year older and the average age of this learning community remains the same. "Community" is used deliberately - because the goal is to build exactly that. Actual ages of its 600+ members can range from 17 to 67 - there can be no assumptions about collective prior legal knowledge, socio-economic background, learning expectations or study habits. In addition, only 200 of those members will qualify to complete the LLB programme.

Legal advocacy is a ritualised skill that can run counter to private and hard-won feelings about justice and morality. In an adversarial system, lawyers do not generally choose which side of a legal issue they take. In recognition of this, legal training imposes the obligation to question, evaluate, argue, or persuade without necessarily believing in the rightness or wrongness of a position taken on behalf of a client. Sometimes it must be done in spite of that personal belief.

Becoming a member of this learning community is therefore transformative and my teaching philosophy is a direct response to that dynamic. I must justify the transformative challenges it will face, acting as questioner, coach, and synthesiser of theory and practice. In one sense the community forms my client base and I seek the best outcome for each member - as I would for a professional client. I must therefore commit to ensuring that, as far as humanly possible, each member of this community can look back upon his or her individual transformative experience, without regret.

My teaching practice - building towards a learning outcome

Using a statute to predict a legal outcome requires acquisition of a new practical art. Rules may be clear in the abstract, but opaque in their application because the language used is capable of more than one interpretation. So the community must learn to tolerate uncertainty of outcome. Applying legislation to a fact scenario where there are arguments for and against the position of the client is an experience that members respond to with differing degrees of comfort. A few seem innately attuned to the process; for others it is internalised with a stern commitment to work; for some it remains a formidable barrier. My obligation is to maintain a watching brief upon that process, to acknowledge the differing rates at which members will respond and to maintain their commitment in the meantime.

Teaching strategies

Building an environment where members will freely offer comment - in a large class, in an unfamiliar discipline, and while painfully self-aware - is the first challenge. I do not select members for individual responses. I do work hard to instil the notion that I cannot model the legal process without the community's active engagement. My consistent practice is to triangulate - in each class the legal domain remains at the apex; my students and I engage with it together. ‘We' is the vehicle for problem solving - never ‘you'.

Because ‘law' is largely foreign territory, members may suspend their personal world view, assuming that it is not relevant. However the ability to think ‘legally' requires marrying individual personalities, language abilities, creativity and sense of ‘justice' with the overlay of analytical and interpretive legal skills.

Those skills cannot operate in a vacuum and I consciously orchestrate that realisation in a pivotal early class. Together we tackle a final examination problem, before any of the theory of the process of applying and interpreting statutes is explored. Never yet has the community failed to invent, from their collective resources, the different techniques of choosing meaning for ambiguous terms (the bread and butter of judicial life). Members then begin to abandon their perception of dissonance between ‘law' and the often-undervalued conventions of ‘common sense', collective social standards and personal morality. Reaching this point sharpens the sense of inquiry and builds confidence in generating argument as we then begin the long rehearsal and legal naming of those legal conventions or principles.

Specific strategies in curriculum development

These are some of the content strategies for building the ‘we' ethic which underpins the community concept:

• Using fact situations to which the community will easily relate when exploring complex legal principles (to help them feel they are learning some ‘real law' along with developing a legal technique)
• Connecting with the community's deep assumptions about what law should offer a society by choosing a wide variety of topics in which to explore legislation: eg. Rights of arrest; duties as drivers; family breakdown and state intervention; accommodation of Maori and other cultural values; degrees of culpability in the criminal law; consumer rights; and the values inherent in the Bill of Rights Act. Stressing members' burgeoning ability to analyse, apply and critique that law, particularly sensitising them to the balance between the role of the courts and the role of Parliament.

Maximising the success of learner outcomes

Practising for success (formal)

My tutorial programme is allied to the rate at which skills are practised in formal class and is designed to reduce anxiety about how ‘well' a member is learning. I work closely with 25 tutors (usually honours students). Supporting tutors in their new role of peer teaching requires building a collegial sub-community, whose guiding principle is to prepare LAWS 101 members for final assessment. This sub-community is vital, as there is a correlation between tutorial attendance and a highly successful learning outcome. Practising for success (informal) I encourage each community member to reflect on his or her own learning and to self-assess progress outside the formal learning structures. But committed members often also wish to work collectively. I have established informal subcommunities, which allow members to disperse their performance anxiety and practise their skills together. One such sub-community consists largely of members who repeat the course, often having passed but not having achieved to the level required to complete the degree. The decision to try again, without point credit, demonstrates a drive towards excellence that I felt compelled to acknowledge. In 2006, 50% of that sub-community entered second year law, 67% with a grade in the A range.

Practising for success - formal pedagogy and pastoral care

Pastoral and professional care in the guise of pedagogy is inevitable - first time law students often get practical exposure (voluntary or otherwise) to the legal system. If I am required to give legal advice, my practice is to explore with the member how the legal technique they acquire in their first semester of legal education can be used to predict the legal outcome. Professional confidences are always respected.

Success - the search for transparency

Transparency is paramount, especially in a limited entry professional programme. Modelling and reinforcing successful legal submissions in formal class and tutorials go part of the way towards establishing performance levels. But that environment does not cater for self -directed, self-paced transformative learning as well as the active use of digital learning environments. One of my computer programs, "Panic Stations", allows the user to serially undertake the process of analysing, applying and interpreting particular legislation or to go directly to that part of the process which they self assess as most challenging. The program also provides paradigm legal opinions ranging from a fail, a competent response and an excellent attempt, with marking commentary on both the form of the opinion and the content of each.

Final comment

Use the rightly valued phrase - ‘transformative learning' - tends to obscure the logic and heart of my commitment to my learning community - a simple passion for the process of law and lawyering. My role is not simply to construct a coherent body of knowledge. It is also about fostering intellectual courage and independence, preserving creativity, and modelling the ethical and process skills that define my discipline.

I now plan to explore how transformative learning is approached in other teaching institutions, to enrich the process I engage in. The ‘e-teaching' discussion lists (both general and legal in their focus) in which I have ‘lurked' for some years (operated by Stanford University, the Carnegie Institute and Warwick University) will provide the direction for exploration. I am looking forward to joining those communities physically, rather than electronically, for the first time and to being a student again - even if only for a little while.

Peer and Student Comments

Students in large classes can easily become alienated unless the lecturer shows, by their teaching and by their engagement, that they are interested in every student in the class. In every aspect of her teaching, from the meticulous course materials, the on-line practice materials, the mentoring of students who repeat the course through to the organisation and encouragement of a strong body of tutors, Donna creates an atmosphere in which students are encouraged to do their best work.

Professor Mark Henaghan, Dean of the Faculty of Law

Donna's personal passion for all things legal is evident in her teaching. Her lectures are always very well prepared, structured and magnificently articulated. However any organised human being is capable of this. What made Donna a particular standout lecturer was the excitement she exuded. She was infectious and made all students want to be able to master the content so they would be able to experience what Donna felt.

Alexandra Fraser LAWS 101 student

Her commitment to ensuring that her students understood the material was evident. She always made herself available out of class time and was renowned as being an approachable, friendly lecturer who genuinely cared about her students. Even though "Evidence" was a difficult paper, I look back on it as one of my favourite classes from my time at Otago.

Bridget Wright, Honours student, now in practice

Donna rounds off the package by providing pastoral advice to any of the students who seek it. She has devised a system which maintains her own professionalism, does not breach confidence, preserves the teacher/student relationship and provides an incentive to the student. She sees this as part of her teaching role - helping students get back on track, helping them achieve the goals that caused them to enrol in her paper in the first place.

Professor Stuart Anderson, Teaching mentor

To me, Donna was a mentor, helping me shape my law career in the direction I wanted. Donna took time out of her busy schedule to help me with scholarship applications, law recruitment interviews and general questions about working in the legal profession. She was there to encourage me when job interviews were unsuccessful; keeping me motivated to strive for the things I wanted. She was also there to celebrate my success when I finally landed the dream job I wanted.

Charmian Oh, former student, now in practice

To my mind, this is a woman who has an absolute passion and enjoyment for the law. It is because she has that passion that she is able to communicate and teach so well. She knows the reality of practice and the world that the profession exists in and her teaching reflects that. This is not the love of the law in ivory towered isolation bit in an everyday existence.

Joanne Hambleton Former student, now in practice