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Collaborating and Co-operating to Make the Connection: How Law Librarians and Academics Can Work Together to Develop Communities of Legal Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2015

Angela Donaldson  and
Graham Ferris
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Abstract

The Library is of value as a physical and social space, as a place that can facilitate learning; independently and in distinct ways to its role as repository of, and point of access to, information. The problems that defenders of this “learning place” aspect of the Library face are bound up with a very powerful, and indeed prevalent, metaphor. This metaphor is of teaching and learning as the transfer of information from one place or head, to another place or head. Therefore, Graham Ferris and Angela Donaldson put forward a far more realistic account of learning, and combine it with an example of learning being enacted in practice. We need to articulate the value of the Library as a place of learning because it is under threat from pressures on resources that are being deployed on a “common sense” but fallacious assumption that Libraries are about the storage and manipulation of information only.

Keywords

librarieseducationlegal education
Type
Selection of Papers from the Biall Conference 2015
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 224 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2015. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

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References

Footnotes

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [6.54].

2 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension 2009 University of Chicago Press.

3 It is congruent with the older and well established “ideas are food” metaphor – by which: “both can be digested, swallowed, devoured, and warmed over, and both can nourish you” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (1980) University of Chicago Press, p. 147. The metaphorical underpinnings of “ideas are food” are: the conduit; ideas are objects; and the mind is a container: and these work with equal naturalness when applied to information.

4 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (1980) University of Chicago Press,  p. 3.

5 Lyman, Peter, The Article 2B Debate and the Sociology of the Information Age (1998) 13 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1063, pp. 1086–87Google Scholar.

6 John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (2000) Harvard Business School Press, p. 2.

7 Julian  Webb, The Body in (E)motion: Thinking through Embodiment in Legal Education, in Affect and Legal Education: Emotion and Learning and Teaching the Law, Paul Maharg and Caroline Maughan (eds) 2011 Ashgate;  Peter Jarvis, Learning to be a Person in Society, in Teaching, Learning and Education in Late Modernity: the Selected works of Peter Jarvis 2012 Routledge. Alternatively learning may be understood as a feature of a system, and a person is one type of system, see: Niklas Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory, Dirk Baecker (ed) Peter Gilgen (trs) 2013 Polity – but we will ignore this possibility, the individual person as system will be embodied, organisational learning raises complications we do not need to consider here.

8 Clement, John, Students preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics (1982) 50 (1) American Journal of Physics 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, A Conceptual Model discussed by Galileo and used Intuitively by Physics Students in D Gentner & A Stevens (eds) Mental Models 1983 Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ: and discussed in Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach 2004 Basic Books p. 3.

9 Gardner gives numerous examples in his review of learner misconceptions The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach 2004 Basic Books pp. 143–181.

10 Brown, John Seely, Collins, Allan, and Duguid, Paul, Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning (1989) 18 Educational Researcher 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (1991).

12 Specifically: midwifes, quartermasters, butchers and nondrinking alcoholics: Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation (1991).

13 There are other legal professions, including some that have traditionally been structured on more of an apprenticeship model, such as legal executives: but for simplicity of exposition we will refer only to solicitors and barristers in the text.

14 Strictly speaking any of the legal professions will be a network of communities of practice and an imagined community. See: Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Steven Hutchinson, Chris Kubiak, & Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Learning in Landscapes of Practice: Boundaries, identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice based Learning 2015 Routledge; and Benedict Anderson. We will explore these ideas below. Professional self-regulation and control over entry to the profession seem to be out of fashion in law in much of the common law world.

15 The occupants of the tailors shops in Happy Corner, Monrovia Liberia, and the researcher as a member of the anthropological and educational research communities in Jean Lave, Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice 2011 University of Chicago Press; Monrovian tailors, Yucatec midwifes, US Naval quartermasters on an amphibious helicopter transport, butchers in US supermarkets, and nondrinking alcoholics in their alcoholics anonymous meetings, all in Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation 1991 Cambridge University Press; the health insurance claims processors working in an office together in Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity 1999 Cambridge University Press; the team of photocopy service technicians in Julian E Orr, Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job 1996 ILR Press: Ithaca & London.

16 Tailors, midwifes, quartermasters, butchers and nondrinking alcoholics in Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation 1991 Cambridge University Press; health insurance claims processors in Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity 1999 Cambridge University Press; service technicians in Julian E Orr, Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job 1996 ILR Press: Ithaca & London.

17 We will actually use network with a slightly broader meaning – as we will use it to designate a group of communities engaged not just in the same practice but engaged in practices that are connected to that practice.

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections of the origin and spread of nationalism (revsd ed) Verso2006, loc 206.

19 Julian E Orr, Talking About Machines, pp. 14–141: “The technicians shape their narratives to create meaning in an inherently ambiguous situation full of facts that do not obviously make sense … The telling of stories is a situated practice … the immediacy of context obviously affects their stories.” Telling the right story, in the right context, is an important part of competence in a community of practice. And how one talks about matters of concern to the community is also an indicator of membership, and one that outsiders can be introduced to: “Since part of the technicians' mission is teaching the customer how to talk about the machines.” Ibid at p. 81.

20 Thus, the apprentice tailors learnt to make clothes in reverse order leaving cutting until last (L & W at p. 72). One important reason for this was that badly performed cutting made cloth useless, a cutting error was expensive: “The apprentice practiced sewing the kind of garment he'd just learned to produce for a while before he undertook the way-in process for cutting it out. The way in for cutting, just like the way in for sewing, required careful observation by the apprentice of many instances of the real thing. But the cost of making an error was usually higher for cutting out a garment than for sewing it together.” Jean Lave, Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice at Loc 1066–1068.

21 The work by Orr on machine technicians led to the creation of the Eureka database which is an example of using information technology to make valuable new learning available to communities of practice through a powerful disseminator of practitioner narratives, see; Seely Brown and Duguid pp. 112–113.

22 What follows relies heavily on the discussion in Seely Brown & Duguid pp. 173–205.

23 [1994] 1 AC 180 & 200. Hale DPSC observed a similar relationship with reference to Abbey National Building Society v Cann [1991] 1 AC 56 and Lloyds Bank plc v Rosset [1991] 1 AC 107 in Southern Pacific Mortgages Ltd v Scott [2015] AC 385 at [107]: “but that would be very odd as the same appellate committee gave judgment in … Cann … on the very same day on which they gave judgment in … Rosset”. Once again these two cases are reported sequentially. However, the internal links are stronger and more legally important in O'Brien and Pitt.

24 Simultaneous reading in the vernacular of mass produced books, and newspapers, is identified by Anderson as key catalysts of the imagining of the National community. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections of the origin and spread of nationalism (revised ed) Verso 2006 at loc 942: “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their own secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”.

25 Occasionally the physical properties record aspects of the history of the book that carry important information, see Seely Brown & Duguid 2000 pp. 173–174; an example of this is found when the Reports are original – the paper is thinner for the reports published during World War II.

26 This feeling of connection can be exemplified by collecting of old law documents: “I spent much of my professional life writing opinions. Perhaps for this reason I find the opinions of barristers of an earlier generation particularly interesting.” Anthony Taussig, Collecting English Legal manuscripts, 2014, Seldon Society at 11.

27 Bruno Latour, Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands in Knowledge and Society vol 6: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, Henrika Kuklick & Elizabeth Long (eds)  1986  JAI Pess Inc: Greenwich CT, p.1.

28 Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.

29 Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild 1995 MIT.

30 As Seely Brown & Duguid remark at 198: “Some documents, such as Web pages, are constantly changing. On the Web it can be very hard to know what the “same document” might mean.”.

31 Students certainly act as if they believe that seeming part of the group is an important part of becoming part of the group: Costello CY, Changing Clothes: Gender Inequality and Professional Socialization (2004) 16 National Women's Studies Association Journal 138Google Scholar. They literally embody through dress their idea of their new identity. In the sessions they literally enact together being legal researchers, people who can locate and assess the currency of legal texts.

32 Etienne Wenger-Trayner and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Learning in a landscape of practice, in Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Steven Hutchinson, Chris Kubiak, & Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Learning in Landscapes of Practice: Boundaries, identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice based Learning 2015 Routledge, at loc 468.

33 Although the starting point and terms are different the importance of this aspect of legal education was made in the Carnegie Report under the rubric of the three apprenticeships, it is the third “identity apprenticeship” that we argue Libraries can help with. Sullivan WM, Colby A, Wegner JW, Bond L, & Shulman LS, Educating Lawyers – Preparation for the Profession of Law, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 2007.

34 See Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott & William M Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice, Harvard Business School Press 2002 and John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (2000) Harvard Business School Press.