Ok, lecturing is not a simple affair. It involves a complex process of merging legal, instructional and motivational expertise. The lecturing challenge is underestimated in most legal educational setttings. However, sometimes other features of the lecturing process stand in the way of good lecturing. Take Nigeria …
Prof. Chris Nwachukwu Okeke noted in his 2014 Justice Chukwunweike Idigbe Memorial Lecture “the legal education system is insufficiently equipped in its effort to addressing the challenges of Nigerian lawyers in the 21st Century”. Apart from the usual culprits also known in western legal academies, Prof Okeke pointed to a surprising cause of falling standards in legal education.
He frowned at the attitude of lawyers combining law practice and teaching. Law lecturers are putting their private practice above their teaching engagement. “There are incidences where those lecturers while teaching in classrooms receive phone calls from their clients, informing them that their cases have been or are about to be called up.
There is no doubt that such calls have the propensity of unsettling both the lecturers and the students’ composure, which will negatively affect the output of the lecturers. Lecturers engaged in full-time law practice are also less likely to find sufficient time to devote to legal research and writing.”.
Next time you are sitting in a Nigerian law school, do not forget to request the lecturer to close his/her mobile phone. Or, to get some innovation in the legal educational sector … ask the lecturer to design his/her class so that legal students are required to use their mobile phone for high quality collaborative learning using their phone.