Law Student Learning, Storytelling and Student Device Initiatives

Law student learning today needs to be student centred and involve active learning. Students need to engage with how the law develops over time in society, and how the law is made up of stories and storytelling. At the same time, modern day students are accustomed to using technology in their lives. This has resulted in a shift in higher education to tap into technology as part of engaging students with their active learning. This paper focuses on one Australian University’s policy of providing students with mobile devices for their learning in law, and how the initiative can actually be interwoven with teaching pedagogy used in the classroom. Judicial reasoning is thus an art, overwhelmingly discharged in printed words and sentences. It is an art that calls on skills of narration and story-telling. The stories are normally told in words alone. Sometimes words are accompanied by pictures, drawings, or maps to make things clearer. Nowadays, judicial narrative appears in electronic form on the court’s webpage shortly after delivery of judgment. Many modern academics have urged the use of storytelling as a means of giving a voice within the legal discourse to the outsider. They argue that the law is indeed replete with stories. In the classroom environment, there are a number of ways professors can utilise the pedagogical basis of storytelling. They can tell “war stories”, thereby providing students insight into how the law functions. A more student-centred application of the storytelling methodology relates to the stories behind reported cases. The goal of this approach is to stimulate student interest in how the litigated case came before the courts. Modern technology has taken the act of storytelling to new heights, resulting in a range of opportunities and tools for creating, learning, teaching, and sharing knowledge in engaging ways and through innovative formats. iPads were found to be a good tool to provide instant access to rich learning materials and to Internet resources. In addition, students often used iPads for information seeking. Students found iPads to be a useful tools that increase flexibility, portability, and productivity because they are small in size, easy to use, and apps could be loaded.