Telling Tales About Law School: Reflections on Care, Holism, and Marginality in Law Teaching

Abstract

In this reflective piece, we explore why and how adopting principles of holistic education can help mitigate the crisis of well-being in legal education and in the legal profession. This project emerged from a series of informal conversations in which we discussed various factors influencing our pedagogical styles and found a shared central essence in both our approaches that align with holistic teaching. Given that this paper emerged through subjective conversation, we present subjective narratives about our experiences as early-career faculty members at Canadian law schools, and then critically analyze the narratives by distilling common emergent themes and threads relating to wellness, teaching with care, marginality, and whole-person (holistic) education generally. Within the context of these themes, we discuss potential avenues for making teaching and learning about law more enriching. Our hope is that this paper serves as an invitation to other academics to contribute their own narratives and stories to the effort toward deeply meaningful higher education. While some of our comments are particularized to the law school context as it is our realm of experience, the broader themes raised here are relevant across disciplines.