Better Together: The Virtues of Experiential Learning Partnerships

• Date: September 29, 2017

The University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, is celebrating two important anniversaries this year: the English Common Law Program’s 60th and the French Common Law Program’s 40th anniversary. Reflecting on a law school’s history and development naturally leads one to ponder the changing nature of legal education and the evolving functions law schools serve in Canadian society. If lawyers bear the honorable burden of maintaining the public trust in the administration of justice – a trust they earn through competence and integrity – then the function of law schools must be to equip law students to achieve their full potential and to meet the responsibilities of their privilege. Our task is to train lawyers that are highly skilled, well-informed critical thinkers, as well as engaged, compassionate citizens.

As my distinguished predecessor, Nathalie Des Rosiers, opined in her insightful contribution to this series, law schools do well when they ambitiously offer their students a broad range of opportunities to acquire a variety of professional, personal and intercultural competencies. I wholeheartedly agree, and I would add that law schools can best achieve this goal through partnerships and collaboration. In training tomorrow’s lawyers and judges, law schools can optimize the relevance and impact of the education they offer by collaborating with members of the profession, civil society and with each other. Through innovative experiential learning partnerships, law schools extend beyond their walls and marshal a wider range of expertise and perspectives, to the greater benefit of every party involved. Experiential learning partnerships allow students to gain real-world skills, while working on real-world issues and ideally, making meaningful contributions to their communities. It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, I submit that it takes more than a law school to train the kind of lawyers and judges that Canadian communities need and deserve: jurists that are proficient in the law in addition to being sensitive and responsive to the societal challenges we collectively face.

Three recent uOttawa initiatives – the Refugee Sponsorship Support Program (Refugee SSP) and the Certification de common aw en français (CCLF), and the Programme de pratique du droit (PPD) – highlight how partnerships between law schools, the profession and community actors have the benefit of allowing students to develop a broader blend of legal skills and competencies and to contribute to their communities, all while keeping our institutions at the vanguard of legal education.

Refugee SSP

The University of Ottawa’s Refugee Hub was founded in 2012 by Professor Jennifer Bond. It aims to provide insights, connections, and mobilization relating to pressing refugee issues at a local, national, and international levels. The Refugee Hub is now home to several major flagship initiatives, including the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative (GRSI).

In response to unprecedented global refugee crisis, Professor Bond and the Refugee Hub, together with a team of volunteer lawyers and legal experts, developed an innovative collaborative model, bringing together law students, lawyers and refugee sponsorship experts, to address a...