Law School Educational Innovation Grant uses expert and student generated multimedia to help students connect theories from the classroom to real-world cases.
For Sydney Law School students studying Criminology offers a chance to engage with the wider issues that form the backdrop to criminal law. In critically challenging assumptions about what makes an act or a person criminal, or how society should respond to both, criminology requires students to engage with material that crosses disciplines and ranges from the theoretical through to the practical. Connecting these parts of the puzzle can be a challenge for both teacher and student. A 2017 Strategic Education Grant hope to address this problem through innovative learning that connects what is taught in the classroom to real-world cases and applications.
Having now taught Criminology for law students a number of times, I realised the need to provide insights into the lived realities of crime, victimisation and criminal justice (Project Lead, Dr Garner Clancey).
Building on expertise of leaders in criminology and educational design and technology, the team will create a series of videos to give students a unique insight into the often inaccessible areas of the criminal justice system. Interviews with leading experts and specific sites of interest aim to bridge theory and practice. Similarly, students will be asked to generate their own video resources so that they can ‘re-see’ the world around them from the perspective of criminology. Whether this is noticing the way crime is reported in the news or the ways that features such as CCTV are embedded into the environment.
Through this it will be possible to introduce concepts and issues which are not always covered by the existing literature. (Dr Garner Clancey).
Such an approach combines expert and student-generated content to revitalise teaching and learning for Law’s criminology students.
