2019

Professor Flanagan Publishes Article on Student Learning in Law School

UMass Law professor Rebecca Flanagan’s article, Anthrogogy: Towards Inclusive Law School Learning, was recently accepted for publication by Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal.

UMass Law professor Rebecca Flanagan’s article, Anthrogogy: Towards Inclusive Law School Learning, was accepted for publication by Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal. Anthrogogy traces the sociodemographic changes among entering law students and argues that the two predominant methodologies for teaching in law school, pedagogy and andragogy, do not meet the needs of emerging adult law students. Flanagan proposes a new methodogy, anthrogogy, to meet the needs of all incoming law students. Below is an excerpt from the upcoming article:

“Law school classrooms today look radically different then the same classrooms just a few generations ago; more than half the matriculating students identify as female, and anywhere from ten to fifty percent of the class would identify as a person of color. The formerly non-traditional law students now make up a majority of the class. However, the delivery of legal education, especially within first-year and large, upper-division courses, doesn’t reflect the needs of our students or developments in higher education that have advanced our understanding of how people learn. The last major advance in legal teaching methodology was the adoption of andragogy, beginning in clinics in the 1980’s. Andragogy, or the ’art and science of helping adults learn,’ does not address the unique learning needs of emerging adults, who make up fifty percent of incoming law students. The article traces the social, cultural, legal, and economic changes that lead to the rise of emergent adulthood, and the unique challenges emergent adults face in the legal academy. Focusing on how the learning needs of emerging adults are not being met by the principles that guide andragogy or legal education’s ’signature pedagogy,’ this article analyzes how law schools can leverage the valuable history of legal education’s signature pedagogy to develop an inclusive methodology for teaching traditional and emerging adult law students.”