Clinic represented at SOTL 2018

The prestigious annual Stellenbosch University Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) Conference was held in Somerset West on 30 – 31 October 2018. The Clinic’s Stephan van der Merwe presented a paper entitled “Towards empirical validation of theoretical assumptions in Clinical Legal Education” as part of the session in “Transforming the curriculum”. In his presentation, Stephan elaborated on his research in terms of the Fund for Innovation and Research into Learning and Teaching (FIRLT) grant, which was aimed at generating comprehensive empirical research into the Clinic’s existing clinical legal education (CLE) module, Practical Legal Training 471 (PLT). The aim of the project was to produce reliable and robust data on student and alumni perspectives of the Faculty’s CLE offering. This independently sourced dataset has proven to be both interesting and valuable in its support of the theory on the affordances of CLE. This data also allows for in-depth situational analysis to develop a reasonable framework for facilitating the successful expansion of PLT in the near future.