Browsing by Author "Hagan, Carrie A."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Catching Fire: A Case Study Illustration of the Need for an Interdisciplinary Clinical Case Partnership and Resulting Student Successes
    (Sage, 2015-01) Hagan, Carrie A.; Boys, Stephanie K.; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    There is an increasing pressure calling for legal education’s evolution into building more practical competencies to better prepare law students for practice upon graduation. Collaborative learning between law students and social work students in a clinical setting enriches their respective educations well beyond their respective traditional curricula. By working together, the students learn other methods on how to handle different clients and their unique situations and how to work with someone of a different disciplinary expertise with the same client. This article begins with a law student’s mishandling of an initial client interaction, discusses the advantages of an interdisciplinary education with social work students and then reimagines the initial encounter after the law student has been taught by an interdisciplinary partnership between law and social work schools. Law students gain a better and broader perspective when working alongside social work students to tackle problems that they not only face in a clinical setting, but also will encounter both in practice and in life.
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    Progress through partnership: Providing Holistic Services VIA SERVICE LEARNING to Benefit Students, the University and the Community
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Hagan, Carrie A.; Boys, Stephanie K.
    In 2012, the presenters developed a new service learning opportunity through an interdisciplinary partnership between the schools of Law and Social Work. The purpose of the project was to enhance the joint JD/MSW program, as well as the experiences of JD and MSW students respectively. The presenters redesigned a Civil Practice Clinic, which had formerly involved only law students, to now pair law students and social work students in order to serve the holistic needs of clients. Referrals for the clinic are obtained through a variety of partner referrals. All of the clinic’s clients do not have the resources to retain legal counsel or services by other means. The law students address the clients’ legal issues and the social work students ensure the clients are connected with appropriate social services, such as domestic violence counseling and social welfare benefits. The teamwork between students increases law students’ aptitude in client-centered lawyering, and familiarizes social work students with the legal rights and resources available to clients. The presenters have adapted pedagogies of engagement, most notably through problem-based and peer-led interdisciplinary team teaching and learning. Students more effectively and efficiently serve community members in need of legal counsel and social services, resulting in a clinic that is beneficial for both students and community members. The partnership resulted after years of witnessing law students struggle with interpersonal skills how to handle client emotions (and a perceived inability to help connect to services) while social work students struggled with an awareness of the law, litigation process/strategy and the roles/responsibilities involved in legal case management. Key to this partnership was not only the development of the interdisciplinary model and structure, but also assessing both disciplines and the success of the pairings. Quantitative data is gathered through an interpersonal skills survey pretest and posttest research design, and qualitative data is gathered through a survey of open ended questions. All students were given the same questions, and responses were anonymous, with surveys administered by a third party. Using the generated responses, the presenters reformat the course each semester based upon feedback, as well as promote the use of this sort of model to other institutions and at various conferences. Other interdisciplinary partnerships are also explored based on student feedback, client and clinic needs. The initial surveys focused on a main goal of increasing law students’ interpersonal skills – as far too often law students’ focus is on the legal tasks and not the human components of interactions with clients. Data analysis found a statistically significant improvement in law students’ interpersonal skills, and level of comfort in dealing with clients in emotional situation. The second round of surveys have been submitted to both disciplines and hope to show two increases: 1) that the law students’ interpersonal skills maintain improvement; and 2) that social work students have a better understanding of the law and legal processes via their participation in the interdisciplinary clinic.
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    Shifting the Lens: A Primer for Incorporating Social Work Theory and Practice to Improve Outcomes for Clients with Mental Health Issues and the Law Students who Represent Them
    (2014) McGraugh, Susan; Hagan, Carrie A.; Choate, Lauren; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    This Essay is an effort to promote the inclusion of interdisciplinary practice in our work as attorneys and in our roles as clinical legal professors. As the legal community continues its renewed emphasis on skills training, law schools should look to other professions in order to produce more lasting solutions for our clients and for more satisfactory outcomes for our lawyers. In this Essay, the authors discuss their work incorporating social work theory and practice into clinical legal education when dealing with clients who have serious mental illness. With some studies reporting up to 64.2% of inmates in the United States having a diagnosed mental illness, it is becoming imperative that law students acquire the skills necessary to adequately represent them. Two pillars of social work practice, Strengths Theory and Systems Theory, are discussed with an emphasis on the role they play in working with this demographic of clients.
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    Social Work and Law Interdisciplinary Service Learning: Increasing Future Lawyers’ Interpersonal Skills
    (Taylor and Francis, 2015) Boys, Stephanie K.; Quiring, Stephanie Q.; Harris, Evan; Hagan, Carrie A.; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    Social workers and attorneys both interact with persons from diverse backgrounds every day, yet although interpersonal skills are an essential focus of social work education, these skills are not addressed in legal education. Interdisciplinary courses in which social workers and lawyers learn interpersonal skills together and have an opportunity to practice them through service learning opportunities are a way to remedy a gap in legal education. The authors describe a project recently piloted at a large midwestern university in which law and graduate social work students participated in an interdisciplinary course with a service learning component requiring students to work together on cases. As one component of the clinic’s assessment, all students were pre- and posttested via an interpersonal skills survey. The law students showed statistically significant improvement in interpersonal skills at the end of the course. The results indicate a need for increased support for interdisciplinary education, specifically partnerships between the professions of law and social work.
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    Social Work and Law: The Educational Benefits of Collaboration
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2013-04-05) Boys, Stephanie K.; Hagan, Carrie A.
    Low income clients seeking civil legal services are rarely in need of only legal assistance. Instead, the issues that drove them to seek an attorney typically overlap into multiple mental health and social service needs. The poster will explain how a newly piloted clinical partnership between the School of Social Work and the School of Law improved the educational outcomes of students, and also enhanced the services offered to clients. The clinic historically served the legal needs of low income clients in Indianapolis. In 2012, an interdisciplinary collaboration involving law and social work students and faculty from both fields was implemented in order to provide holistic services to clients. The poster will describe the model, including how the clinic is structured and the roles for students and faculty. Preliminary data on the educational benefits for both law and social work students will be provided. The clinic has been found to address both student learning needs and the needs of clients in the local community.
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    Social Work Skills Can Fill the Gaps in Legal Education: Law Student Opinions of their Preparation for Practice with Clients
    (2015-01) Boys, Stephanie K.; Quiring, Stephanie Q.; Hagan, Carrie A.; Robert H. McKinley School of Law
    Legal education focuses on case analysis, without instruction on practice with clients. Social workers argue the client, as the consumer of services, is the best source of knowledge when assessing needs. Therefore, the authors conducted a qualitative study of law students, as consumers of services, regarding whether law school prepares them for practice and what additional training they need. The responses indicate that law curricula do not prepare students for practice, and that students desire training in interviewing and human behavior. The respondents were enthusiastically receptive to interdisciplinary instruction. Therefore, the time is ripe for social work and law schools to further explore interdisciplinary collaborations, which will ultimately result in better served clients.
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    Yes, You Can!: Course Collaboration for a Richer Learning Experience and Institutional Change
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Hagan, Carrie A.; Adams, Cynthia
    The authors’ poster will report on their collaboration efforts, using experiential learning to enrich their respective curriculums and their respective students’ learning experiences. This collaboration is a major step towards effecting critically needed institutional change. For decades law school faculty have been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether theoretical, casebook courses are more important than clinical skills-building courses. Even within the clinical ranks we hear debates about the relative importance of clinical/experiential courses versus legal writing/simulated drafting courses. The fact is that all these experiences are essential to a law student’s education. Many, if not most, law faculty see the merit for each type of learning experience. However, because faculty are concerned that collaboration might infringe on their academic freedom or perhaps adversely affect their faculty status, their teaching efforts remain highly individualized. Students, though, are suffering from this compartmentalized approach to learning. First, they can encounter difficulties transferring the lessons learned in a course to either a real world situation or even another course. For example, students often have a difficult time transferring the motion or brief writing skills learned in a legal writing course to a clinical experience where they are drafting motions and briefs on behalf of clients. Second, because clinical skills-building courses are expensive, there is a tendency to offer fewer of these courses or fewer experiences. The more law schools can provide clinical skills-building opportunities to students and the more schools can provide different settings to reinforce these skills, the more prepared our law students will be for law practice upon graduation. The way to provide these additional experiences without breaking the budget is to provide collaborative experiences between courses. The authors have discovered that you can create a relatively low-key, low-prep collaboration while still respecting each collaborator’s autonomy and academic freedom. There are numerous benefits to this type of collaboration. The collaborators gain a new level of understanding and appreciation for what is going on in other courses. Also, collaborators can come away from the experience with fresh ideas for their own curriculum and inject new life in their courses. But, most importantly, the students benefit from the additional experience. The authors have joined together to create collaborative opportunities between their law school’s civil practice clinic and a brief drafting course. Prior to collaboration, both authors met to discuss their students’ respective needs and shared the pedagogy, goals, syllabi, and lesson plans for the respective courses. By sharing this information, the authors developed ways to incorporate new experiential learning opportunities for both sets of students in different contexts. For example, the brief-writing students work on issues commonly faced by the clinic students (e.g., child custody modification); the brief-writing students will also visit courts to observe proceedings. This experience gives the brief-writing students a sense of how issues addressed in their briefs have real world application. In turn, the clinic students will be judging the brief-writing students’ oral arguments. This experience, giving clinic students an opportunity to experience the other side of the bench gives them insight into ways to effectively advocate their own clients’ cases. The two best briefs from the brief-writing course that focus on issues often addressed in clinic cases will be placed on file in the clinic so that future clinic students will have access to these briefs to help jump-start their understanding of these issues and the law. The poster will illustrate the steps to partnering, report on the authors’ own collaborative experience, include recommendations on implementing this approach in other courses, and show how this type of collaboration can create positive outcomes for faculty and students, and facilitate institutional change.