 Rhaiddoi'n gweithio, mae'n fawr i'r ddweud i'r gweithio'r projekty y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, sy'n gweithio'r cyllid. Rwy'n Siobhan Cullen, yng Nghymru Llyfrgell Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, mae'r collig Brona Hefron. Felly, mae'n ymdweud yw'r anodd newydd, sy'n gweithio'r cyllid ymdweud. We have collaborators working with us on this and other third level institutions, namely Larry Donnelly and then you and David envoy and David caboará drawing with us on this and we also have a following agreement is being made byhammer technology to Critical Energy. Unfortunately they can't beнымácwr hear today due to example,, commitments. So apologies for that. We're also fortunate enough to have the Law Society of Ireland acting as consultants and we also have another external consultant, which is Georgetown University in Washington I'll tell you more about those later. The title of our project then is Street Law, and it's a module to enhance the transferable skills of law students. It's a digitally supported module, and it involves community legal education, which is targeted at second level students. So I'll just tell you very briefly a little bit about community legal education. It's essentially law students bringing the law to the community. It's street law is an internationally recognised methodology, but this is the first time it's been trialled at undergraduate level in Ireland. It's very much an interactive methodology. It's based on problem-based learning and an emancipatory methodology. Again, I'll speak more about that a little later. In this case, the target audience are second level students, and so far as the third level students are concerned, it's about learning through teaching for them, and it's about enhancing their understanding of the law and their role within it through experiential learning. Whilst simultaneously providing a service to the community, it's also a pipeline project in the sense that second level students are the target audience. So that's what the project is. I'll now move on to tell you what we have done in the first six months of the project. Not necessarily in chronological order exactly, but one of the important aspects of this was the branding of us, and there are really two reasons why we thought this branding of it, rather, why we thought this was very significant. It is an internationally recognised methodology. It originated in the States. It does exist as a method of teaching law in the UK and in other parts of Europe, and we wanted this to be uniquely Irish, as it's the first time it's been trialled at undergraduate level here, and we wanted to have national impact going forward. So we're showcasing today a version of our logo for the Street Law project. We've tended this to designers, and it's with the designers. So this is our version of it thus far, but it's based on the Irish road sign. We wanted it to do two things, really. We wanted it to be uniquely Irish, so we've included the Irish version of Street Law, and we wanted it to be directed at the target audience, the second level students, and be something that would provoke their interest, and the transition year coordinators, who are the people who bring these projects into the schools. And our tagline, then, is law students in the community. So that's a version of what will become the Street Law logo. The digital infrastructure is something that it's difficult to capture, I suppose, out of all of these projects, the amount that we have done in a very succinct way. But we started with acquiring the domain streetlaw.ie, which is now registered through HEANet. And we've done a lot of research on the appropriate digital platform to use. And as you'll be aware, there are lots of different opinions as to what's the best, and in some ways it's horses for courses. But I suppose the two things that were important for us were that it's user-friendly, particularly as it's going to be used for the third level students to interact with the second level students, and that it is resource-friendly going forward. So ultimately, we've decided to use Blackboard to support the delivery in terms of the third level students, and then the website streetlaw.ie, which is currently under construction, will have embedded within it a WordPress blog, which is one of the ways that the third level students will interact with the second level counterparts. They'll create collaboratively a blog based on the law that's being taught and learned. It's ultimately going to be open access, and we'll serve as a repository of streetlaw lesson plans going forward, because the ethos of streetlaw is very much about sharing resources. And that's certainly true internationally, and has been our experience of working with our international consultants. We've acquired laptops for the students to use, going into the schools, and are in the process of acquiring e-books in terms of the streetlaw manuals, which are coming from the states. So, as was said with the previous project, this is very much at the development stage, and is the work plan for our next six months going forward is to put this platform in place. To talk about the sort of two aspects of the collaboration that we have ongoing, the collaboration with our third level counterparts, our partners, and with our consultants, has been a very positive engagement. We're a relatively small group. We have had regular meetings and have a steering committee ourselves and our counterparts in those institutions, and that's vital to the buy-in to the project going forward. I can't emphasise enough how important the external consultants have been, the Law Society of Ireland, who have piloted streetlaw in Ireland, but at professional training level, and it's not an accredited modulus extracurricular. They have been very generous in terms of sharing resources. They've invited us to streetlaw exemplar classes that they've run, and they've shared resources and mock trial materials that we intend to use going forward. Georgetown, in Washington, who invented streetlaw 40 years ago, have also been extremely helpful. They've invited us to attend their orientation clinic, and they're coming to us and bringing their faculty and their students in January to run the orientation clinic for our accredited module pilot. This, we hope, is going to be the beginning of an interesting and fruitful collaboration going forward. We've also developed interesting links cross-border with the University of Ulster and with Queens, who've both been involved in streetlaw, either at postgraduate or at extracurricular level, and they've been extremely helpful too, and because of where we're situated geographically, that's another interesting collaboration for us to explore. The second level collaboration is the cross-sectoral aspect of this, and the enthusiasm from the schools, I have to say, has been unequivocal. We have two schools on board to run our pilot, but we could have had many, many more. The interest from the schools, from the transition year coordinators, and from the students themselves has been immense. We're essentially running two iterations of streetlaw this year, so just to explain that briefly, in September we're going to run a small pilot. This is not going to be accredited. We're going to be using a small number of student volunteers who've just come through our civic engagement module, and they're going to pilot it on the basis of four classes to be run in each of the two schools that have signed up to the project. Once that pilot is then evaluated, we're going to run the accredited module in January, which is where Georgetown are going to come and run the orientation clinic. Streetlaw essentially requires a two-day orientation clinic, as they call it, which is a team building and an introduction to the methodology for the lecturers, the students, and everybody involved in the project. For our pilot in September, the Law Society are coming to run that for us, and then for our accredited module in January, Georgetown are going to do that. We've been involved in a number of meetings, attending the secondary schools, getting a feel for how they run, and working out the logistics with the transition year coordinators in terms of the number of sessions, the size of the groups, who's going to be in the room, and all of those kind of issues, which are very important if it's to be done right. This is to culminate then in a competitive mock trial between the two schools, which will take place at the end of their streetlaw sessions. That will take place on campus in LYIT. Our partner institutions will be running the accredited streetlaw module simultaneously in January 2017 on a similar basis in their own institutions. At this stage, we are preparing to deliver the pilot in September. As I've already said, the Law Society have kindly offered to come and facilitate the orientation. This will be important for academic staff development and for the third level students to be inducted in the streetlaw methodology. As I've already said, we've met with the transition year coordinators. We're now in the process of recruiting students. The demand for the streetlaw project is going to exceed the number of places we have available, so it's going to be a competitive application process. The students are very, very keen to get involved in this. The logistical issues such as garden clearance and child protection issues are underway. In a nutshell, we're going to have a teacher in the room during the sessions and a member of academic staff in order to cover those issues, but garden clearance is required. At the moment, our students who will be involved in the pilot are rehearsing the lesson plan development with peer assessment, which has proved to be, I think, a very fruitful exercise for them. Just lastly, before I hand over to Brona, the emancipatory nature of streetlaw is something that we're working with the students on. What I mean by that specifically is that the target audience choose the areas that they want to learn about and they very much run the development of how the lesson goes. For example, if they wanted to learn about the law that governs their education, they would identify that as an area they want to learn about, and then through a process of discussion, they would identify the issues, the potential problems, and how they think the law should be shaped in order to deal with those issues. So it's not a case of feeding them the answers. It's very much an interactive methodology, which is why the training is required. At the moment, we're very happy that we're in a good place in terms of preparing for the pilot in September. We've researched and planned and are looking forward as are the students to piloting this. So I'll hand over to Brona who's going to talk to you about national impact and evaluation. A lot of what I'm going to say initially is going to reiterate what Siobhan has said in the context of it being a national programme. The first feature of this for us is the collaborative aspect. Siobhan has alluded to the collaboration between the project partners. Clearly, we really need to enhance or to maximise the potential of this project. We need to have that collaboration across the board with all law departments and we're going to promote the pilot in the sense of publicising it and again publicise the whole street law initiative in January when we run it off then and hopefully that will engage other third level institutions. We have the international engagement where we have Georgetown coming in January and we've also had interest from Eastern European countries as well in coming to that because it's clinical legal education is taking off there simultaneously. The interaction between the third and second level educational centres as Siobhan has said, the response has been immense. We went to a career's advisory fair to promote it and the response was the transition year coordinators, they need something in that legal socio-political space and this kind of programme meets it so they would love to get hold of it. The professional educational sector, the law study around board is consultant and they've been really positive and very engaging and very helpful. It's an interesting space however because the legal services regulation act was passed at the end of December and until now legal education has been entirely the domain of the professional bodies. That provided for the establishment of an authority which is going to review legal education with the view to opening it up. In the UK for example the universities provide professional education, that's not the case here. So that leaves an opening and it certainly will make third level bodies a lot more interested in legal education but it's specifically in the act refers to reviewing the provision of clinical legal education. So it's going to make it a very interesting space in the sense that universities and institute of technology are going to be far more interested in expanding into that area and the professional bodies to be fair to them are going to become a little bit more cautious about being so positively engaged because it might cut into their territory. Benefits for third level students, well obviously these are I suppose one of our main priorities if not the main priority and our first priority for them, our benefit for them is that it creates the social aware lawyer, that they realise that the purpose of education is to serve the community and that it's not just the mercenary street lawyer that you might see on TV, that it's a much broader concept and so that's certainly for us that whole civic engagement, community engagement is a very important part of it. Equally though they're going to enhance their transferable skills by running these programs it's not based on substantive law, it's very much application of it and between preparing and leading out of street law lesson they will have to organise plan, translate very substantive law into very easy accessible language so their own transferable skills will be greatly enhanced and obviously increase their employability and because they have to do this ultimately on their own we're hoping that it will develop their own belief in their capacity to do it and that as they leave law graduates they'll be more competent personally as a result. Academic staff development, well this is a move in terms of the traditional delivery of law programmes, yes we use problem based learning but it's very much desk based taking it out into the interactive environment using a digital infrastructure will be challenging but the way that's going to be supported is to lead out staff initiatives and I have to say the teaching and learning forum has provided an awful lot of seminars in the digital space which are being used and will continue to be used to enhance the digital skills in terms of the interactive nature we've been focusing on getting staff to attend interactive workshops for example we're just back from an experiential learning workshop and we're trying to develop that type of teaching in the law department which will be a challenge because it's certainly not the traditional. Clinical legal education, apart from the regulatory changes there's a clinical legal organisation of which we are members all the participating partners are members and it has been decided to establish a website for it to promote clinical legal education generally. Now I'm conscious I'm going to be going on speed here because of the time constraints. The first point up there is just echoing the whole community engagement aspect of it and what we have, the street law pedagogy virtually endorses all of those things that are set out in the campus engage charter so which came first it's hard to know but they certainly complement each other hugely. All of those are very ideological we have to make it easy to implement and the digital infrastructure is essential there. If it's not easy to replicate in other institutions it will be too challenging for them to do so and that's probably our lasting legacy is that we give something out to all the third level institutions that they can easily engage in this type of interactive learning. The last thing that we were to look at is the evaluation and sustainability and this was certainly one of the things we felt we had to go back to the drawing board on arising from the panel's comments late last year. In terms of evaluation we have now three stages to this we had anticipated and this basically is going to be an accredited module in 2017 so it needs to meet academic standards and obviously that level of rigor is useful because it means that it has to be up to speed and at this stage the module has been drafted it's gone through the early stages of our academic council no major queries at all in relation to it it's now going into the final stages with the export report is due this week we don't expect any difficulties there and it should hopefully pass with no difficulty. In terms of the run out of the programs very much it's going to be a work in progress forever because that's the nature of street law that you do it, you reflect, you redo it and so on cyclically. We always intended to do this and we want all of the stakeholders involved to participate and we're going to be going to our collaborating partners for their feedback after the pilot. We're equally going to go to the academic staff and mentors involved. Crucially we're going back to the third level students who we had asked to participate in identifying what skills they needed. We're going to do a similar survey then but they will be assessed using reflections and between the two of those we're going to have a huge amount of data generated both quantitative and qualitative which will really test the validity of street law as a pedagogic method and we're going to go to the recipients as well, the teachers and the students out in the schools to see what they feel values the program. That's going to generate a massive amount of information and this is an extra which we've added in and we realise we have to do we're not going to be able to read all of that stuff so we've gone and during the last six months we put in an application to get a research master's student who is going to come and we've been successful in that application and they're going to basically collate, digest, work with all of that information and ultimately their question is going to be street law in Ireland, what works and why so we're going to do all the groundwork, we'll be able to feed them this information and hopefully they'll be able to feed back on it so again that will also give us a way to publicise and disseminate the information earned on it and that's pretty much where we're at. Thank you very much for listening and apologies for the speedy ending and thanks for the opportunity.