Case for the defence of tutorials

The tutorial is, apparently, passing rapidly out of existence. Its disappearance will significantly impoverish the learning and teaching environment of undergraduates. Let me take the example of law.

Law students typically embark on their studies with a product-focused understanding of their new discipline - an understanding which gives overriding emphasis to the legal system's outputs (statutes and precedents) and which is informed by the assumption that these outputs can be unproblematically applied to the types of activities that they are intended to regulate.

It is with such an understanding that students usually begin their first tutorial, only to discover, within minutes, that the law they had taken to be open to ready application is, in fact, far from determinate. As each contribution to discussion throws up a new interpretation of the relevant law, it is common to find students grappling uneasily with the realisation that theirs is a discipline in which it is dangerous to assume that existing law provides ready answers to all disputes.

The tutorial also provides a setting in which to alert students to ways of coping effectively with their newly discovered difficulties. This is because it affords an opportunity for them to supplement their knowledge of legal product and its deficiencies with an understanding of legal process: ie, the repertoire of argumentative strategies which makes it possible to offer plausible (if not unquestionably correct) answers to legal problems.

Law is, of course, a social practice which is informed by, inter alia, the value of justice. Thus, when a tutee who is faced with a novel claim for compensation argues that we should respond to it positively by extending the law on an analogical basis and buttresses this view by emphasising the point that such a decision would give effect to the value of justice, then he or she can be regarded as making effective moves in a legal language game.

There are three further arguments which support the view that the tutorial's disappearance would be regrettable. First, in gaining a working grasp of the law's processual dimension, students gain a grasp of the skill of argumentation - a skill which embraces both a capacity to articulate a distinct point of view and an ability to respond promptly and effectively to counter-arguments. Argumentation is, moreover, a transferable skill which will serve its possessors well in extra-legal contexts and will endow them with a significant measure of added value on graduation. Second, participation in processes of legal argumentation provides an example of active learning: ie, learning which involves drawing on existing knowledge in such a way as to supplement it. This is precisely the kind of learning which was advocated earlier this year by the Lord Chancellor's advisory committee on legal education in its first report on legal education and training.

Third, the tutorial facilitates enculturation in a disciplinary community providing just the kind of setting in which active learning would seem to proceed most effectively.

Earlier this year, I devoted an hour usually given over to a conventional legal philosophy lecture to what I hoped would be an innovative and insight-engendering teaching/learning experience which would, if successful, promote understanding of the complex multi-layered character of legal discourse. I split the students into three groups.

The first group was presented with a hypothetical case concerned with negligence law and was asked to devote 15 minutes to the task of seeking to resolve it by drawing on relevant legal materials. The second group was then given the same time to analyse the argumentative strategies employed by the first group. Finally, the third group spent 15 minutes commenting on the wider significance of the issue under discussion: eg the way in which negligence law seeks to accommodate both our interest in security (by establishing duties of care) and our interest in freedom of action (by seeking to ensure that those duties are not unduly burdensome).

With a few minutes remaining, I sought comments from a second-year student of negligence law who had been invited to observe this session. This student posed a question that I had not been anticipating. "Isn't that the kind of thing that we do in tutorials?" The answer to this question is, of course, "yes". This is because (as I now realise) each of the three groups concentrated its attention on distinct features of the kind of language game that typically unfolds in a tutorial. The first mobilised legal product in the process of arguing towards a conclusion, the second exhibited awareness of the argumentative moves being made within the game, while the third revealed sensitivity to values internal to that game. I, therefore, am convinced that the looming loss of the tutorial is a matter of significance.

Richard Mullender is lecturer in law at the University of Exeter.