Student Led Co-Design of a pilot ‘Courtroom Ethnography’ Module

About this initiative

The aim of this project was to support current UCC Law students to codesign a novel ‘Courtroom Ethnography’ module. Courtroom ethnography is the study of courtrooms and court observation. Courtroom ethnography is a full immersion and observation of the courtroom, which provides students with valuable opportunity to witness the law in motion, bridging the gap between theory and practice. Well-established courtroom ethnography modules in other jurisdictions have shown that engagement with courtrooms is an invaluable learning experience: “An understanding of the way the courts work is important to the study of law and to all aspects of legal practice… Combined with more detailed study of the legal system, court visits can help inform this understanding” (Salek, 2015). It is clear, that ethnography is an excellent learning centred approach providing critical skill development and immersion in practical experiential learning which speaks to the signature pedagogies of law (Shulman, 2002) Under the SATLE 2023 grant, students engaged in fieldwork to a partner institution in Gothenburg, Sweden with developed ethnography modules, and completed ethnographic fieldwork and workshops with their institutional student colleagues. The students will also undertake ethnographic studies themselves in Cork and will then co-design a courtroom ethnography module with the PI and colleagues to be run as a new module LW3377 Courtroom Ethnography in the academic year 2023/2024.