Creative Reflection at Queen Mary’s Law School
I became aware of the Flourishing Spaces work through a talk I attended as part of my PGCap course at Queen Mary over a year ago. I was really drawn to it because of the immediate parallels I could see between the experiences of medical students that Professor Louise Younie was describing, and law students who I work with at the Queen Mary Legal Advice Centre, in the School of Law.
At the QMLAC, law students work with clients: meeting with them, discussing their legal issue, and ultimately providing them with legal advice. The human dimension of this clinical work is so important for the students to take in to consideration, both when preparing to work with their client, and in the aftermath of meeting with them, but can easily become a secondary consideration to the legal research and letter preparation work, and the other modules, exams and coursework the students have going on at the same time.
With my colleagues and Louise’s support, I ran a pilot creative reflection session at the QMLAC with clinic law students a month ago. The students who attended were asked to select artwork postcards to help them reflect, unpack and empathise with the clients they had worked with over the semester, as well as a way for them to realise the effect the clients had had on them. They reviewed and selected artworks that reminded them in some way of their clients, or the cases they worked on, then used the artworks to describe their cases to one another.
I was apprehensive before the session that students would not feel comfortable sharing their experiences, or that they would struggle to engage with the artistic way of reflecting, but was thrilled that the students who attended took to the session really well. The session ran over time, the students participated willingly and engaged with the artworks in meaningful and poignant ways.
One participant, on reflecting on attending the session, said:
“I realised that with all the studying and appointments, it has been a long time since I sat down in a quiet space, outside of my room, and simply talked. That is something I truly appreciated.”
I was particularly struck by this feedback. I had been so anxious about resources and the session ‘going well’ up until reading this, when in fact, carving out time for the students to be able to talk, and creating a small, flourishing, space for them, was the ultimate aim. I’m hoping to continue these sessions this semester, and create a few more flourishing spaces for our law students.’
Read more on the students reflections and the session here: QMLAC facilitates its first Creative Reflection Workshop
Text by: ***Eve Haynes (*Public Legal Education and Street Law Coordinator)
