A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Enhancing learning in legal education
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exposed in an environment where they are primarily responsible for their own learning.
Therefore they need to be given the necessary tools and the confidence to work in ways
that may not be familiar to them, for example as part of a team or as an independent
researcher. The structure of the module or course may also need to be adjusted to allow
a more flexible use of the time available.
RESEARCH-BASED LEARNING IN LAW
In the present university environment, academics are under pressure to deliver both
quality research and quality teaching. The relationship between teaching and research
is widely seen as important. For some, it is the proximity of teaching to the processes of
knowledge creation that gives higher education its ‘higher’ quality. At the same time,
discussions about the emergence of ‘teaching-only’ universities, and concerns that
institutional Research Assessment Exercise strategies may actually distance research from
undergraduate teaching in particular, reflect an alternative, but also common, view that
teaching and research may be – and in practice often are – largely independent activities.
Whatever else it may have achieved, this debate has helped to focus attention on what
added value research can bring to the classroom.
Conventionally it has been assumed that, insofar as there is a connection between
research and teaching, it lies in the subject expertise of staff. In other words, law teaching
will be research-led where teaching and learning reflect and are directly based upon the
specialist research interests of the staff delivering the curriculum. Such an approach can
leave students in the position of spectators rather than participants. They can admire the
scholarship from a distance, but not necessarily gain any deeper understanding of
research itself as a process of learning. However, there are methods of enabling undergraduate
students to participate in research through learning and teaching which are
explicitly research-tutored or research-based (Jenkins et al., 2007: 29). The difference
between these is that the former tends to focus on enabling students to engage critically
and reflectively with research literature and data, whereas the latter actually enables
students to do research and learn through the process of enquiry. Such methods, it is
argued, add real value to undergraduate work for both learners and teachers. Learning
becomes linked to the lecturer’s research interests in ways that develop new and original
research for the lecturer, while giving students direct experience of research, and
increasing their motivation to learn.
A number of UK universities are developing institutional strategies to build the
connection between research and undergraduate learning. Some of these are free-standing
research initiatives, such as the Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme at Warwick
University, which pays undergraduate students to work on research projects with faculty
members. In 2006 to 2007, 57 such projects were funded, including two within the law
school. Others may operate at the level of a department or course (see Jenkins et al., 2007).
However, there are still relatively few discipline-specific examples in law, aside from the
ubiquitous dissertation, of course. In the remainder of this section, through illustrations
in Case studies 2 and 3, we focus on two recent UK examples of what can be done.