Posted by ExCEL
11 April 2025
The members of ExCEL Caroline Keenan and Tom Baycock have been awarded a grant from the Association of Law Teachers for a project named ‘Revaluing Nature’: Using bi-cultural law and craftivism in transformative environmental law learning.
For the last four years, Caroline and Tom have delivered active learning activities on an inter-disciplinary cross-campus environmental law module, focussing on a type of bi-cultural law legislation granting legal personhood to natural entities in New Zealand. These statutes incorporate common law legal personhood with Tikanga Maori (law), ‘visions for knowing and caring’ for nature ‘in its own right not as a possession’. The Acts are drafted to include poetic declarations of the ‘identity’ of a natural entity, reflecting long established relationships and understandings. Students choose a species, space or natural entity and write their own ‘identity sections’ of statute in the form of a preamble to an act granting legal personhood to their entity, before analysing the benefits and disadvantages of a range of legal mechanisms to their choice in their assessment project. Students consistently rate this process as a highlight of their degree.
The ALT grant enables the team to develop and disseminate this work in 3 ways:
(i) Development of learning activities using craftivism methodology to surface values and measures of justice in relation to the natural world.
Currently a bi-cultural legal format is used, divorced from an equivalent identifiable cultural basis. Caroline and Tom will use this grant to work with Open the Box Arts to develop ‘craftivist’ learning practices, those which support students to connect with their inherent values and sense of justice by the process of making.
(ii) Demonstrate how and why activities combining affective and psychomotor learning with cognitive learning of law can be effective tools.
This work will include a study using student ‘friendship conversations’ between two friends, one who completed the original learning activities on the module and one who completed both the original and newly developed activities. (iii) Open Access ‘Playbook for Educators and Learners’ designed by SigneLDesign, setting out step by step guides to achieving the intended learning outcomes, by delivering these learning activities.
Caroline and Tom hope to enable other legal educators to deliver these types of learning activities in their own modules and for other learners to benefit from them, using the format of an accessible playbook.
Many congratulations to Caroline and Tom!