Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash

Metaphorical Hallways: Critical Pedagogies and the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities — or: What happens when you put a paper maché torso in the hallway or ask your colleagues to look under the dress?

By Gillian Calder and Rebecca Johnson.

One of the gifts that the Canadian Network for Law and Humanities (the “CNLH”) offers is the opportunity to engage critically on the role that the arts can and should play in a legal education, with colleagues who are pushing the boundaries of those questions in all dimensions of their scholarly work.

Like many of our colleagues, we have had the opportunity to see, over the past few years, that an arts-based practice is a valuable component of our pedagogical tool-kits. We have experienced, time and time again, that creating space for students to engage with art in a legal education, including as a means of evaluation, is a valuable thing to do. This value comes, in part, from a more dynamic and engaged classroom in which to foster the development of core legal skills; a critical dimension of what people are increasingly calling a competency based legal education.¹

We know that part of our job as educators is ensuring that our students become ethical professionals and critical problem-solvers. Alongside introducing them to foundational legal concepts we are tasked with teaching them how to perceive and how to see. Arts-based practices and pedagogies can be one component of persuasive argumentation, another way to reimagine the contours of a problem, to see pathways through an issue, as a methodology of conveying information to a client whose experience of the world may be very different. Pedagogies with creative roots have long been centred in many Indigenous legal orders, in which art, dance and song are explicitly woven into moments of formal and public legal work.² This is less true with modern common law education, which has conventionally been focused more actively on a textual approach to law.

And yet, we have seen some extraordinary things happen in our classrooms as a result of trying arts-based approaches (for example, poetry workshops, play-readings, mural making). Similarly, we have seen extraordinary things happen when students are invited to generate legal arguments (for the purposes of evaluation) in formats drawn from their own experiences and engagements with the arts. We have become convinced of the power and possibility of these approaches. But we are also conscious that it often means experimenting with methods and practices that are outside our own wheelhouses. We acknowledge the importance that modelling has had for our own comfort in putting some of these pedagogies into practice. Here, we acknowledge the importance of conversations with colleagues, who have shared ideas, possibilities and stories about things they have tried.

Each such encounter has left us conscious that it has been difficult to find the time and space to talk with each other about what we do in our classrooms, in designing our syllabus, in evaluating our students, or in sharing the powerful work the students are producing. That too is a draw to this network, another way to pass on some of this practice, to talk about what we have tried and what we have seen, and most importantly, to connect this work to the current debates swirling again about what is core to legal education.³

A premise of the CNLH is that law and humanities breathes through innovating work like the scholarship that informs the law and literature genre. But law and humanities is also inclusive of courses centring law and film,⁴ classroom pedagogies like “the card game”,⁵ and evaluation methods like the opportunity to submit a project in place of a paper.⁶ The network creates space for addressing the role that skills like empathy, imagination and creativity play in the development of ethical legal professionals.

A small story to make our point. As a result of a recent office move, Gillian had to confront the reality of what to do with the many pieces of student art that she had accumulated over the years. We have a website — Project Pedagogy — where we archive images and critical commentary on as many of those projects as possible. This is both to create a record and so we can (with time) recycle the projects that have been gifted to us by former students. But the reality of parting with some of this work is easier said than done. Before recycling one of the meaningful projects that Gillian has kept for years she put it on a table in the hallway and immediately found herself in substantive conversations marked by curiosity.

The project was submitted in family law to answer the question “How does law regulate our understanding of the family” by a student who is both a trans man and the birth mother of his children. In his first year of law school, our student was sued for custody of his children because of his gender identity. He did this project, in part, as an attempt to document what it is to be at the same time a birth mother and a trans man, including notes and photographs from his children. But he also created it to engage the reader in an interrogation of positionality. On one view of the project you find yourself as a midwife might, staring up the stirrups. In another it asks you to be the person giving birth and gives you a book “Are you My Mother” carefully annotated, to remind the reader of the proliferation of the ideology of motherhood and to play with the gender binary.

Being in conversation about this paper maché torso took me back to another moment when this same student took the opportunity to remind those of us with cisgender privilege about what it means, every day, to carry that privilege. He talked about his experience, as a man, in the changing room at his local pool, with his children calling him mom. The object and its stories flowed out in ways that were transformative; modelling how creating space for creativity in legal education enables unique engagement on some of law’s most pressing issues.⁷ In sharing the student’s completed project, we had a way into thinking about both the challenges faced by students living with or confronting gender diversity and the importance and joys of inclusive legal spaces, learning and community.

Similarly, across the hallway, Rebecca has used the wall and table space outside her office to share a rotating curation of student work. And alongside the reactive conversations, the admiration of the work and at times the surprise, there was the kinesthetic dimension of learning. The dress (shown below), handed in as part of the evaluation of Law 315: Business Associations is an example of something that makes its argument through performance.⁸ The price tag on the outside of the dress tells you that it has been marked down to $3.00. But when you lift the hem and look underneath there you encounter a mass of tags, each one speaking to the hidden costs of the fast fashion industry, not just the actual costs of labour and materials, but the deeper costs of fashion — the production of super weeds, temporary labour, and the mental health of precarious work, amongst many other costs.

On the one hand, work like these two projects make tangible how story, film, art, collage, and poetry can be profitably drawn into the classroom to enrich the way we teach and the ways in which students learn. Taking the time to talk about the work in both real and metaphorical hallways shows as well the ways in which students teach and we learn. These student projects, shared, continue to model the work of critical legal education.

Reflecting on arts-based practice is also a way to talk about legal pluralism. Teaching in a multi-juridical country requires dexterity across legal orders in order make persuasive arguments. Training students to work with text has always involved imparting diverse ways of working with stories. Our argument here is not a criticism of that crucial work. There has, in fact, been very little work done in Canada to examine in a systemic way the relationship between critical pedagogies and the development of humane professionals in law.⁹ Thinking about the role that art plays in a legal education is one way of reimagining what “core legal knowledge” can and should mean in an inclusive, multi-juridical and post-pandemic Canada.

In talking about what to say in this blog, we were taken back to Delgamuukw, and the moment where Chief Justice McEachern told Gitxsan elder Mary Johnson, who was singing her adaawk, that the song was not persuasive evidence because he had a tin ear.¹⁰ Indeed, he told the courtroom that he ought not to have been exposed to the song, asserting “This is a trial, not a performance.”¹¹ For so many years, that story has so aptly shown what happens when one legal system figuratively, cannot hear another. What we hope this work will do is enable us all to step into these moments; not just to throw up our hands at a judge and his inability to understand song as law.

We are, yet again, at a critical juncture for legal education. This network and its gathering of scholars, who are engaging in so many exciting ways with law’s relationship to humanities, offers us another opportunity to talk about what is at the heart of law and the varying ways that we can train students and ourselves to work competently with all forms of legal texts.¹²

  1. Annie Rochette, “Competency-Based Legal Education: What, Why and How?” (October 31, 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DWhTvAvD4g
  2. Maxine V. Matilpi, Button blanket pedagogy (LLM, University of Victoria, 2010).
  3. Jordan Furlong, “A Competence-Based System for Lawyer Licensing in British Columbia” Interim Report Submitted to the Law Society of British Columbia (May 10, 2022) available at https://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/Website/media/Shared/docs/publications/reports/Furlong_Report_-_A_Competence-Based_System_for_Lawyer_Licensing_in_BC.pdf
  4. Rebecca Johnson, “Reimagining ‘The Truth North Strong and Free’: Reflections on Going to the Movies with James Boyd White. In J. Etxabe & G. Watt (Eds.), Living in a Law Transformed: Encounters with the Works of James Boyd White (Maize Books, 2014), 173–187.
  5. Suzanne Bouclin, Gillian Calder and Sharon Cowan, “Playing Games with Law” in Zenon Bańkowski, Maksymilian Del Mar and Paul Maharg, eds., The Arts and the Legal Academy: Beyond Text in Legal Education (London: Ashgate, 2013) pp. 69–85. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2281062
  6. Sara Ramshaw, “Law and Humanities: A Field Without a Canon” (2019) Law, Culture and the Humanities online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1743872119886235
  7. A description of the sculpture is available at: https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/projectpedagogy/2019/05/27/reimagining-justice-art-law-and-social-change-the-gallery-walk/
  8. A description of this dress is available at: https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/projectpedagogy/2019/05/27/reimagining-justice-art-law-and-social-change-the-gallery-walk/ [same blogpost]
  9. Gillian Calder, “The Importance of Creativity, Empathy and Imagination to Legal Education in Canada.” Canadian Network for Law and Humanities, Allard School of Law, August 29, 2022.
  10. Leslie Hall Pinder,“The Carriers of No”, (1999) 4 Index on Censorship, 65–75.
  11. As reported in Pinder, supra, p. 69
  12. Rebecca Johnson, “Law & Culture: Drawing Texts, Masks and Blankets into the Law School Classroom” (September 5, 2022) https://reconciliationsyllabus.wordpress.com/2022/09/05/law-culture-drawing-texts-masks-and-blankets-into-the-law-school-classroom/
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