Foreword to The New Lawyer: Re-imagining the First Year of Legal Education.

Professor Sally Kift ^[1]

As they commence their journey to becoming the next generation of new lawyers, what should commencing law students know, understand and be able to do as a result of their learning in the critical first year of their legal education? How might the curriculum, their teachers and their peers support first year learners for an optimal and positive engagement with the study of law and the disciplinary culture? How might those same first year students be facilitated further to lay the robust foundations necessary for future learning, diverse careers and global citizenship in an evolving knowledge economy?The New Lawyer seeks to answer these questions, and more besides, by re-imagining the "educational conditions" ^[2] in which we place first year law students and by advocating a coherent, sustainable and carefully aligned legal education that seeks to ensure all students entering Australian Law Schools, whether undergraduates or postgraduates and whatever their entering backgrounds and experiences, are supported equitably to learn and succeed academically, socially, emotionally and philosophically.

The first year of the modern law degree bears a heavy, foundational burden, as even the briefest rehearsing of contemporary challenges (and opportunities) makes clear. In the context of a new national quality and regulatory regime, heralded by the commencement of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) in early 2012, first year must be constructively designed with the end - articulated program outcomes - firmly in mind. Specifically, it must make an intentional contribution to the demonstration of student attainment of minimum discipline learning outcomes - the Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for law, ^[3] which were developed with broad disciplinary consensus over 2010 and are congruent with the requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), ^[4] the latter comprising a critical component of the government's new Higher Education Standards Framework. The TLOs are an important anchor-point and frame of reference for many of this book's chapters, while the discussion itself makes a further and significant contribution to legal pedagogy in the context of the HE Standards Framework, given that HE providers are required to assure, at a threshold level, that all staff who teach students "have an understanding of pedagogical and/or adult learning principles relevant to the student cohort being taught" and implement good and scholarly practice. ^[5]

As this book makes explicit, in accordance with the principles of transition pedagogy, ^[6] law's first year must be designed carefully and intentionally to assist diverse student cohorts make the successful transition to the nature and culture of legal learning, while also equipping them with the requisite knowledge, skills and dispositions needed, not only to persist, but to be successful and independent over the course of their degree, and for a lifetime of professional practice, the latter inevitably now characterised by challenges and ideas unimaginable at the time of university study. For undergraduates new to higher education, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds, the first year experience of law may be exacerbated by the need also to adjust to independent learning at the tertiary level, in all of its social, cultural, administrative and academic facets. For graduates coming to law from other disciplines, a measure of guided 'unlearning' may need to be intentionally facilitated to aid transition from prior, and quite different, educational genres.

A great strength of this book is that it makes clear and explicit what is required for early learning success in law by demystifying the often hidden rules, behaviours and habits that students require for success as they strive for mastery of their new law student role. ^[7] It does this by presenting and exampling fundamental threshold concepts and foundational skills - including the skills of research, thinking, communication, collaboration, self-management and study - in an engaging and accessible manner, while holding firm to uniformly high expectations and standards of all students. This substance, together with the practical tips and guidance provided, the pauses for reflection on learning, and the underlying requirement for students to engage with an emergent sense of professional identity - what it is to think like a lawyer, to act responsibility and ethically and to promote the ideals of justice and public service - are everything that the academy, the profession and society more broadly could wish for in a thoroughly modern legal education that better prepares its students to take their place as 'intellectually and morally responsible citizens'. ^[8]

But, as the marketers would say, 'that's not all'. Many other contemporary educational imperatives are also addressed in this thoughtful and comprehensive first year treatise and, in its pages, both law teachers and law students alike are provided with the tools required to respond and thrive in a crowded curriculum landscape. Particularly, the more recent obligation to address well-founded and specific concerns around the mental heath of law students and the effect of law's signature pedagogies on student wellbeing are considered, while other, more perennial, issues regarding the assurance of deep learning engagement with subject matter often perceived to be complex and dense are dealt with in the constructivist way through the provision of opportunities to contextualise and makes sense of learning by building on prior experiences and establishing relevance through connection with contemporary issues and affairs. Law students' and graduates' special obligations to our country's Indigenous peoples, the desperately needed paradigm shift to balance adversarial with alternative dispute resolution thinking and engagement with broad notions of justice and global citizenry, round out this impressive first year curriculum roadmap.

As is obvious in the above, The New Lawyer is a learning-centred text written by two highly regarded experts in legal education and the first year experience. It seeks to assure and enhance the quality of the first year student experience of law by explicitly engaging, motivating and supporting student learning.

It engages commencing law students though its dynamic writing style, appealing format, periodic references to contemporary issues and events, and the use of flowcharts, checklists, diagrams, tables and timelines. Acknowledging the diversity of career pathways open to law graduates, professional and wider vocational relevance and opportunities are explored by providing explanations of how the material canvassed relates, not only to the practice of law and broader professional responsibility, but also to the acquisition of both generic and discipline-specific employability skills.

The book motivates student learning by promoting active and authentic learning. It does this by modelling, and explicitly requiring students to practise, what they need to do with the knowledge they are acquiring; all of the domains - knowledge, skills and dispositions and their practical applications - are canvassed in the pages that follow, and no one domain is privileged to the detriment of another. The book includes in each chapter regular self-directed learning exercises, practical exercises for the development of important foundational legal skills, exercises that promote student collaboration, and prompts and tasks that require students to apply their learning to practical situations.

Finally, the book supports student learning by encouraging both reflective and independent learning. It does this by including specific material on how to be a reflective practitioner and an independent learner, exercises that require students to engage in independent learning (for example, particularly in relation to legal research skills development), prompts requiring students to reflect upon what they have learned, and tasks requiring students to reflect upon their own views and beliefs.

As legal educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that the first year experience of law is inclusive, engaging, supportive, intentional, relevant and social. This book is an invaluable tool for ensuring compliance with that responsibility. It is a fresh and innovative re-imagining of the contemporary first year of legal education. I strongly commend this book and offer my warmest congratulations on a significant accomplishment to both its authors and its publisher, John Wiley & Sons.

May 2012