Finnish lawispart of Nordic law,andin the classifications oflegal systems it couldbelocated in the civil lawlegal family(Husa,2012). Legal concepts and legislationare typical Nordic law, however the Nordic legal system and thinking seems to be pragmatic (Husa, 2012). This has an influence on the teaching-learning environment of law and reflects to disciplines’ own teaching and research traditions. In legal studies it is important to learn the theory and knowledge needed for practicalprocesses, judgements and solutions (Neumann, 2001; Neu-mann, Parry & Becher, 2002). Exercises where knowledge is applied to professional practice, such ascasestudies, are commonly usedinthe teaching of law (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Neu-mann, Parry & Becher, 2002). This is relevant also in Finland.
Students in the Faculty ofLaw of the large research-intensive university where our case study is located are selected through discipline-specific entranceexaminations and on the ba-sis of their National MatriculationExaminationgrades. Each year, approximately 20% of ap-plicants are admitted to the faculty and 250 new law students begin their studies at the uni-versity. These students have the right to complete both thelower (BA 3 years) andhigher academic (MA 2 years) degrees after passing the faculty’s entrance examination. At the bach-elor’s level law studies have been organised in a school-like manner, and most of the courses are compulsory. The coursesare organised as mass lectures for the whole cohort (250 stu-dents), and summative assessmentswithwritten examinations aremainly used. The learning environment especially at bachelor’s level has been experienced as very demanding, because studying for a degree is mainly based on independent work andin some courses the exami-nations are extensive (involving up to thousand pages to study). At the master’s level, stu-dents havemorefreedom of choice ontheir courses, and theMAdegree consists only of a few compulsory courses together with more optional courses.
Lecturing is awidely used teaching method in the highereducation teaching and learning environment,particularly with largegroups ofstudents. Forexample, lawteachershavebeen showntoexperience lectures which give knowledge of basicstructures of discipline asvery necessary(Bager-Elsborg, 2017). However, inrecent years lectureshavebeen critiquedas
inefficient inactivating students to use a deepapproach to learning, wherethe student’s in-tention is tounderstand the meaning of texts andintegrate new informationinto his/her ex-isting knowledge (Bligh, 2000). These diverseconcerns about the problems of lecture-based teaching ask teachers to draw more attention to pedagogical practiceswhichcan be used to support students’ active learning inmass lectures, such assmall discussionduring lectures, clickers, and interactive tools of various kinds (e.g., Lonka & Ketonen, 2012; Mayer, 2011).
Inlegal education, the curriculum is commonly based on theory and knowledge that stu-dents must learn inorder to solve legal problems. Generally speaking traditionallectures can be seen asquiteteacher-centred innature and do not support the task of problem solving verywell,nor help students to construct their own understanding of subject matter (Bligh, 2000; Kember & Kwan, 2000). Therefore, teachersinlegal education havebeen encouraged to develop their teaching and create a learning environment whichimproves students’ active learning and promoteinteraction.Inthe pedagogicalliterature, there are some encouraging examples of how the learning-centred pedagogicalapproaches can be practisedinteaching largecourses.Forexample,theproblem-based learning (PBL) method hasbeen used in some bachelor’s levellawcourses (Bärlund, 2013; Lindblom-Ylänne,Pihlajamäki & Toom,2003).
PBL is traditionally created for small group teaching, but it has also been used very success-fully in a privatelaw compulsory coursewith 180 students in a modern classroom (Bärlund, 2013). The classroomwasplanned to support activeteaching methods with flexible tables and ICT tools.
Previous research has also shown that Finnish law students experience their teaching and learning environment generally more negatively than students in otherfaculties (Parpala et al., 2010). In a similarvein, there is research evidence that students inlegal education often experience a lack of support and feedback from teachers, and they feeltheneed to be respon-sible onlyforthemselves(Haarala-Muhonen etal.,2011). Thus, it has been suggested that students needtoget feedback fromtheir teachers that isrealistic, supportive and useful for their learning(Hattie & Timperley, 2007). In Finnish legal education, it is commonfor stu-dents to get feedback onlyin the form of coursegrades. On theotherhand,during teachers’
weekly office hoursstudents have an opportunity to receive feedback, and some teachers havealsoarranged feedback sessions afterexaminations, but students veryrarely take ad-vantage of these opportunities.
Although learning legal methodology and legal reasoning are experienced asthe core com-petencies of the legal profession (Bager-Elsborg, 2017), the pedagogicalresearchonthisissue is verylimited. Thus, thiscaseprovides new informationbyshowing andexamining a mass lecturecoursewhichfocuses on legal methodology and itsteaching practices.The next sec-tion presentstheempiricalcontext and data. After that, characteristics oftheteaching and learning environment are presented. The finalsection provides an overview of the identified opportunities and challenges relating to implementing the method course in a law pro-gramme.
9.3 Empirical context and data
The coursewe focus onin this chapter is within a master’s degree programme inlaw. The target duration of law studies is five years: three years for the bachelor’s degree and an addi-tional twoyears for the master’s degree. Thebachelor’s degree has limitedrelevance for the labour market, and thus,the goal of nearly all students is to graduatewith a master’s degree.
The majority of Finnish law students (90%) graduateas Masters of Law and their dropout rate is one of the lowest among different degreeprogrammes. However, the length of time required by students to graduate has increasedinrecent years. The averagestudy time (bach-elor’s and master’s) at the Faculty of Law has variedbetween sixyears and six and a half years (Kota-database, 2009). It hasbeen shown, that only a quarter of law students have graduated in the expected five years study time(Haarala-Muhonen etal., 2017). Ontheother hand,itis possible to complete the whole degree(i.e. including bothbachelor’s and master’s degrees) veryquickly,inless than fiveyears, according to theUniversity Register. The master’s pro-gramme courses comprisemainly lectures, but seminars and workshops are also offered.
Most oftheseworkshops areorganised together with stakeholdersfromtheprofessions. The assessment methods vary from written exams and learning diaries to oralpresentations and legal problem solving.
Thiscase study is based on a 9-week-long legal methodologycourse (3 ECTS; 1 ECTS equals 27 hours of work) at a largeresearch-intensive university inFinland. Seven different teachers taught on the course. The course is compulsory for thestudents majoring inlaw; it is designed for master’s level law students. The course introduces the students to fundamental principles of legal method (including both the general legal method andspecific research methods), as well asencouraging students to apply legal method. The coursewas new and offered for the firsttime atthe timewhen our studystarted. The teaching languages of the coursewere Finn-ish and Swedish.
An extensive data-set was collected from this legal methodology course. The total number of students who completed the coursewas 191. Of these 191 students, 103 participatedin this study on a voluntary basis. This group of students were heterogeneous interms of what year they had started their studies in the FacultyofLaw(M=2012; therange from 2004 to 2016) andhow many ECTS they had earned during their study path (M=210).Pre and post-courseinterviews withtwo lead teachersaswell aspost-courseinterviews withfivestudents were conducted. Alllectures were observed by oneresearcher. The research materials in-cluded video-observationdata(i.e. totalling hours ofvideo-recordings of lectures 30 hours), allproducts and resources the students workedwith (i.e. students’essays, assigned reading materials, lectureslides, reminders and feedback posted at the Moodle), course documents (i.e. courseplan, curriculum, essay description), students’ grades, and researchers’ observa-tionnotes. In addition, students completed the modified versions of HowULearn survey (see Parpala & Lindblom-Ylänne, 2012) and the Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS; Vermunt, 1994) survey after the course. Thesurvey items were adapted to measurestudent learning at the courselevel. HowULearn providesinternationally and disciplinary comparable information about student learning, self-efficacy beliefs, and their experience of the teaching-learning en-vironment. The items ofthe ILS focus on students’ self-regulation skills.Thequestionnaire used included also two open-ended questions, inwhich students wereasked to describe what
they learntduring thecourse and givewritten course feedback. Table 17belowprovidesan overview of data:
Table 17 Overview of teaching and learning activities, participants and dataset (legal educa-tion)
Types of data General course material: course plan, syllabus, lecture slides, essay description, resources provided via the Moodle; assessment criteria
Observation protocols: filled for in total 13 lectures (30 hours) Video recordings: 13 lectures (30 hours)
Audio recordings: Interviews with two lead teachers and 5 students. All recorded material was transcribed
Documents/Products: essays; grades; notes, reminders and feedback posted at the Moodle Interview data: Group interview with the lead teachers before the course started (1 hour);
post-interviews with the lead teachers after the course (each lasted 1-2 hours); post-inter-views with five students (each 1–1.5 hours)
Field notes/social media data: Field notes (in total 26 pages) from every lecture; course-related communication via Moodle
Student survey: HowULearn and ILS inventories with two open-ended questions in the end of the field course including questions about experience of teaching-learning environment,
• additionally, the coursegives an inductionto the methods of doctrinal jurisprudence as well as comparative law, legal history and sociology of law
Therefore, by the end ofthe course, the students should know:(1) the basic principles of the-ory of knowledge; (2) theprinciplesofgeneral and legal argumentation andreasoning; (3) the principles of legal theory of interpretation; (4) the basic principles and the purpose of legal methodologies; and (6) how to produce scientific legal text.
In the pre-interview, the lead teachers emphasised that the reason why the coursewas developedand offered is that bothteachers and students intheFaculty of Lawhavenoted that teaching legal methodologyhasbeen inadequate: ‘first of all, there’s been a lot of bad feed-back on the previous situation and second, according to the lecturers [of the master’s seminars], students are unprepared to conduct research, they are incompetent’ (Teacher 2). In addition, lead teachers noted that learning methods take place implicitly:
‘the students have no education on methods before the [master’s] seminars. They have not been given any information on what methods mean. They might have a very naive view on methods and they are not [generally] interested in what methods are because they think that they don’t need any methods [in their working life]’ (Teacher 2).
Because of that, the lead teachers have found that students do not have the necessary knowledge and skills to complete a master’s thesis. Inaddition, students often struggle with writing argumentativetexts: ‘on essays’ idiosyncrasies, so here it’s typical to do very descriptive work and not justify arguments’ (Teacher 1). Furthermore, according to the lead teachers, the stakeholders from theprofession have proposed that theargument skills of law students should be improved. Therefore, the lead teachers highlighted that one mainaim of the course was to enhance students’ argument skills.
The lead teachers highlighted in the pre-interview that the mostcrucial aimof the course was that ‘the students learn how to conduct [master’s] theses, learn to write, and learn to con-duct research’ (Teacher 1).They alsothought thatthis courseaimed to prepare students to analyse legal texts and to conduct arguments:
‘it’s important for students to participate in the research scientific community’s discussion or in this argumentative conversation, so it’s not enough for them to describe something or some of our professor’s perspectives or views on what it is said in the law, what another professor has said, what some judge has said. Students should be able to form arguments and justify them and they have to be able to analyse different texts they use with some sort of arguments.
So it’s an argument which is justified and they have to be able to analyse it’ (Teacher 2).
To reach thesemainaims of the course, the lead teachers had divided the courseinto teacher-led activities and students’ independent learning.
The lead teachers also explained that this course was designed for students who are s tart-ing to write their master’s thesis: ‘of course it does not matter if students complete this course earlier, however, the course has especially been designed to support the writing and completion of the master’s thesis’ (Teacher 1). The lead teachers also emphasised that ‘the idea [of this course] has been so that the students complete this course first and then participate [master’s thesis] in seminars and start with the theses’ (Teacher 2).
Insum, according to the main teacher interviews and the observation data, thecourse fo-cused both on disciplinary content (e.g. to understand the principlesoflegal methodology) and partly on more generalskills (e.g. to be able towriteindependent, scientific legal texts and provide convincingarguments). A visualisationof the structure of the course is outlined in Figure12. Thecoursewasplanned from the teachers’ side to consist of three parts. The first two parts consisted of nine compulsorylectures.The thirdpart of the coursewasessay writing. In the pre-interview, the lead teachers emphasised that:
‘the idea is that the knowledge content of the course is taught first, so students are not just made to write essays, instead they are first told what research is and what methods mean, what are methods’ role in research, how to participate in the scientific discussion’ (Teacher 1).
The coursethus combined bothcontent-focused and learning-focused approachesutilising the sequential strategy inwhich lecture-based teaching wascomplemented withstudents’ in-dependent learning, such as studying assigned reading materials and writing anessay.
According to the interviews with the main teachers, the main activities of this method course comprised lectures, studying assignedreading materials, and essay writing. Figure13gives an overview of theseplanned activities and how much time of the 81 hour (workload for a 3 ECTS course)wasallocated for each activity fromthestudents’ perspective. A quarter of the workload wasplannedfor teacher-ledactivities(i.e.lectures). However, most of the course’s workloadwas assigned to students’ independent learning (suchas studying assigned reading materials and essay writing). Based on the teacher interviews and the observationdata, the course was implemented for the most part as it was planned.
Figure 12 - The structure of the lecture-based course in methodologies in law
Next, we describe in more detail the characteristics of the mainactivities of the course, and how these activities were experienced from the students’ side.
9.4.2 Lectures
Observationdata and teacherinterview datashowed that the course included two main kinds of lectures: first, traditionalcontent-driven lectures, and second, slightly more practical lec-tures withinvited guests, whorepresented different traditions of legalmethodologies (see Figure12). Alllectures wereplannedtorelate thematically to each other. The lectures were held frontally and they took placein a large lecturehall (seeIllustration7). All lectures aimed to give an introduction to different principles of legal methodologies and conducting legal re-search, aimed atproviding background information to the essay writing and independent learning. The content ofthe lectures mostly comprised factual and theoretical knowledge re-lating to the topic, but also examples of the teachers’ own research and class exer cises/prob-lems were provided. Guest lecturers also addressed practicalissuesrelating to the topic.All teachers also tried to engagestudents in the lectures by encouraging them to ask questions. Otherstudent-activating methods, such asgroup discussions, were used during one lecture. Inaddition, in the end of the first four lectures, students in the Finnish speaking group were asked to writetake-home messages(i.e. briefly summarise the key findingsoflecture). The lead teacherwho wasresponsible for these four lectures provided feedback for students based on their take-home messages. The feedback wasposted on the Moodle platform. The same teacher alsodeliveredthefeedback inthebeginning ofthe second,third, andfourth lecture. No furtheractivating methods were used. PowerPoint wasextensively used inthe lectures.
Lectures by teachers 25%
Studying assigned reading materials 37.5%
Writing essay 37.5%
Figure 13 - An overview of the planned main activities (legal education)
The number of students attending thelectures varied fromapproximately 140–230.
The number of students attending thelectures varied fromapproximately 140–230.