Call for Input – Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Educators’ Companion

Edited by Julia Dehm, Kate Galloway, Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay (La Trobe eBureau, forthcoming)

Climate change related risks, impacts, responses, and disputes are transforming all areas of legal knowledge and practice. There is an urgent need to transform legal education to produce more “climate conscious” legal professionals with the skills and knowledge to be thoughtful, strategic and successful advocates in a climate-transformed world. 

To support the mainstreaming of climate change considerations in legal education we are developing a novel text: Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer – Educators’ Companion.

This resource is a companion volume to the open access textbook, Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (La Trobe eBureau, 2024) (“principal text”). The principal text provides an original and innovative analysis of the conceptual challenges climate change presents to different areas of law and an overview of cutting-edge level developments in response to climate change. 

While the principal text is aimed at students, the Educators’ Companion is aimed at subject coordinators and law teachers, providing a just-in-time resource for curriculum design, pedagogies, and classroom activities designed to enhance law students’ learning experience and enable their mastery of ‘climate conscious’ knowledge from the principal text. In addition, this volume will also equip law teachers with a toolkit to inspire teaching that develops cross-cutting “climate conscious” skills, attributes and competencies including problem-solving, norm innovation and creativity. It will provide the overarching principles of curriculum design and pedagogy, together with nested and scaffolded learning activities and assessment tasks that legal educators can embed across curriculum to align with course and unit specific learning outcomes and diverse institutional graduate qualities.

This companion volume will do so by: 

• Proposing ways of formulating program and subject intended learning outcomes to reflect the inclusion of climate change related course content and “climate change competencies” to support the institutional embedding of these objectives;
• Proposing approaches to teaching and assessment that provide a readily applicable framework to support educators in meeting subject and course learning outcomes concerning climate change competencies;
• Providing both stage- and subject-specific learning activities, case studies and assessment tasks to ensure students understand, apply, analyse and evaluate the content covered in the principal text; 
• Providing specific learning activities and assessment tasks to enable students to cultivate and develop “climate conscious” skills, attributes and competencies, that is, the practical skills that are necessary to be a strategic and successful legal professional in a climate transformed world. 

We are inviting all Australian legal academics to contribute any teaching notes – including curricular strategies, teaching approaches, learning activities and assessment formats – that fit the book’s purpose and structure.

Contributions that are accepted will be included in full as an appendix to the volume, acknowledging authorship. The book will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. Through a creative commons licence, the lead authors may draw on, adapt, or include excerpts from any contribution to illustrate practice within the text of the book. Any use of contributions will be attributed by link to the relevant contribution. All contributors will be named in the preface of the book. 

For any questions please contact us.