The effect of integration on learning: An analysis and evaluation of a legal writing project in a South African Law Faculty

Abstract

This article analyses the implementation and evaluation of a first-year legal writing programme which, over a period of three years, was increasingly integrated into the law curriculum of two first-year courses with a concomitant improvement in students' assignment marks, as well as in their and their tutors' perceptions of their learning. It argues that an increasingly integrated approach improves the legal reasoning and writing abilities expected of a first-year law student. The course design focused on the genres required in the law degree along with the underlying cognitive skills of analysis, synthesis, application, evaluation and argument necessary for legal reasoning. Students were required to submit four writing tasks to trained final-year student writing tutors who provided extensive personalised feedback. These ungraded tasks served to scaffold students' subsequent submissions of coursework assignments. External evaluations of the project each year facilitated reflection and informed changes made to the project design. The conclusion drawn is that a particular type of integration that is achieved through 'insider-outsider' collaboration between an academic literacy expert and a law academic may be most effective in achieving the desired outcomes. INTRODUCTIONIn 2014, the Department of Higher Education and Training awarded a Teaching Development Grant to the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town (UCT) to implement a legal writing project for first-year law students. The grant came in the wake of complaints from law practitioners and academics about the poor literacy skills of law graduates (Bangeni & Greenbaum, 2013;Snyman-van Deventer & Swanepoel, 2013.) The focus of the innovative Legal Writing Project (LWP) was to integrate the teaching of legal literacy skills into the disciplinary content of two first year law courses: Foundations of South African Law and the Law of Persons and Family.Beginning with the background to the project, the paper describes the theoretical approaches that informed the design of the LWP, followed by a description of the project curriculum. The purpose is to determine which of these approaches and which changes made to the project over the three years might have contributed to the significant improvement in the students' grades for their law assignments and to their more positive evaluation of the LWP. The conclusion drawn from the findings is that the increased integration of legal-literacy development into the disciplinary content of law, as well as the cumulative emphasis on critical thinking, might have been two factors that enhanced the positive outcomes of the project. This conclusion is confirmed by the external evaluation of the project. BACKGROUND TO THE LEGAL WRITING PROJECTThe project was structured around the legal-literacy requirements of two subject courses, and focused on explicating the skills required in the course assignments: a case summary, a case note, a problem essay and an argumentative essay. The lectures were scheduled around the due dates of t...

Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective

“…There is a range of persuasive scholarship, both locally and internationally, that supports discipline-specific writing development for all students (Dean and O 'Neill 2011; Editors: Avasha Rambiritch and Laura Drennan Gottlieb and Greenbaum 2018). Much of this scholarship emerges from the 'academic literacies' approach to writing development McKenna, 2016, 2021) which views writing as a social practice that can only be learned as part of the specific discourse or discipline, rather than a set of general, individual skills that can be taught generically, outside the discipline (Archer and Richards 2011: 10-11).…”

“…Discipline-based teaching of writing at South African universities, although not yet widespread, does appear to be gaining traction. In law, for example, Gottlieb and Greenbaum (2018) argue for the effectiveness of a collaborative pedagogy ) in teaching and developing writing. show how a collaborative pedagogy in law led to significant improvements in students' written assignments.…”

“…are attempting to develop student writing (for example,Swanepoel and Snyman-van Deventer 2012; Clarence, Albertus and Mwabene: 2013;Broodryk 2014 Broodryk , 2015Crocker 2018;Gottlieb and Greenbaum 2018;Snyman-van Deventer and van Niekerk 2018;Bangeni and Greenbaum 2019; and Crocker 2020, 2021).…”