- Law and
- Legal Education
The pivot to online education during the pandemic has led those who teach students at all levels to explore how to promote student engagement in online classes. While building and enhancing teacher capability with online teaching is important, given the social unrest and other political, social, and emotional challenges presented by the pandemic, perhaps especially in the law school context, expertise with shifting the teaching of legal doctrine to online modalities alone is not enough. Law teachers need to consider how they can bring an anti-racist and trauma-informed lens and a focus on wellbeing to their online pedagogy and create learning communities that are democratic, inclusive, and caring. While this article was inspired by recent events, its co-authors share a longstanding commitment to these ideas and strongly believe they are applicable across many contexts, including legal education. This article identifies approaches, strategies, and tools law teachers can use to promote equity, inclusion, belonging, and wellbeing for all learners in their classrooms, especially students from historically marginalized groups. It focuses on methods for creating community within classrooms in an online environment in ways that promote racial justice and support individual and collective wellbeing. Part I discusses the reasons the co-authors have chosen to prioritize this aspect of our work. Part II explores how we create an intentional learning community where everyone belongs, in large part through equitable design and through creating a welcoming space for learning. Part III highlights a number of additional ideas we hope will inspire readers to re-imagine their own courses with attention to the goals and aspirations of this article.
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