A reflection on delivering legal education to business students

Vida Allen, Kingston University

The ideas contained in this paper have been mainly developed through my experience of teaching business law and company law to professional, foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate accounting and business students. This is a reflection in two senses – first, it is a reflection on the various recommended methods I have adopted; secondly, I have yet to discover the best way to teach law to non-law students.

Although law courses generally form part of the core modules of business undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, business students tend to find law boring and difficult. This particular problem has often been associated with the way of teaching - many have argued that this problem could have been overcome if a different teaching approach were to be adopted. As I will illustrate, it is submitted that teaching methods often only play an ancillary part - other factors, such as unfamiliarity with legal language, could equally contribute to the difficulty of learning law. I will also discuss the new perspective of 'threshold concepts' that are possibly 'troublesome' for students.

This paper is divided into four sections. First, it will briefly examine the rationale for including law in the business curriculum and discuss why business students might find studying law demanding. Secondly, the paper will review some of the teaching methods commonly adopted. Next, factors other than teaching method that contribute to non-law students' difficulty of learning law will be considered. The final section offers some conclusions.

Disciplinarity

Business students usually struggle with law. Some of my more forthright students have indicated to me that study of law is a 'necessary evil' - they need to pass their law modules to get their degree, but they are not particularly interested in the nature of law. From their feedback it seems that students generally feel overwhelmed by the amount of reading required - they are often not sure what and how to study. This can then lead to further problems in writing assignments and examinations. Often, it results in low marks being obtained and lecturers left feeling frustrated. Unsurprisingly, teaching law to non-law students from other disciplines, as Bradney (1998) commented, is "characterised as being both secondary and inferior to that teaching and those students that are found within the law school".

A 'discipline' can be conceptualised as "an area of structural, socially patterned activity that is organised around a body of internal protocols and assumptions, characteristic behaviours and self sustaining values" (Vick, 2004). This refers to the classic phrase 'academic tribes', formulated by Becher (2001). Given the subject matter of this paper - teaching law to business students - it seems prudent to start by examining briefly whether different tribes and communities are formed on the basis of the 'Bildung' each tribal member has received. (Die Bildung is "the forming of the personality as well as the inculcation of knowledge" - see Kahn-Freund, 1966.)

It has been said that in learning a certain academic discipline students are also learning a set of conventions that are oriented towards the status quo (Stallybrass, 1948). The framework of each distinct academic discipline is different in certain respects. As Nissani (1995) suggests, disciplines are also social communities, with members who share "personal experiences, values and aesthetic judgments". The cultural roots of each discipline were developed to form a community, so that all newcomers would be trained to acquire the necessary language, conventions, values and background knowledge in order for the tribal members to easily 'communicate' with each other.

This academic 'patriotism' is important so that the discipline in question can survive and prosper. On the negative side, it can also be restrictive, as it ignores the need for cross-disciplinarial dialogues. Learning about other academic disciplines means that a new set of rules has to be acquired, however, we are often reluctant to invest in the process of learning the rules of other disciplines and are therefore prone to remain within the boundaries of our own discipline.

As an academic jurist teaching company law to business students I often get the feeling of 'otherness' on the territory of another tribe when I attend the board of study at the business school, tolerated and treated with courtesy and diplomacy, but there is a very distinct feeling that "you are not one of us". From the students' point of view, I have been isolated as 'the other' before teaching has even started. The result is problematic, because it potentially hinders the students' learning progress.

I have often wondered why first year business students find law hard going and boring before having any actual experience of study of law. However, very few LLB students at my institution had ever chosen to study a non-law option module, and this lack of curiosity on the part of law students is equally intriguing. Could it be argued that if students come to a discipline with certain assumptions about the subject matter, they will then interpret the content of the module in their preconceived way? In other words, they are less willing and prepared to embrace the subject they perceive to be 'different' to their main discipline.

To put things into perspective, it is important for us to map out where law fits into in the business school curriculum. Early business school education consisted largely of descriptive treatise on existing practices in industry specific settings. The curricula had a strong vocational focus and included coursework on book-keeping, filing, secretarial studies and similar subject matter. The vocational focus remains the centre point of business education to this day.

Before I discuss the reason why law is considered as an essential part of the business education, I have included Byles & Soetendorp's (2002) rationale for the inclusion of law in a non-law curriculum for our consideration:

• ensuring accountability
• application to the discipline
• effect on the operation of work
• requirement of professional body
• knowing when to bring in a legal advisor
• background to the main area of study
• concept of citizenship
• knowing how the law works
• creating opportunities to change law and shape the law
• ability to communicate across disciplines

The above points are general in nature, and apply equally to other programmes such as social work and engineering, where students have to know, understand and apply specific rules of law. The points are wide, but most of them are fairly pragmatic and could be incorporated into degree programmes.

However, I feel that I need to address the requirement of professional bodies separately from the other points, as it is usually possible for students to apply for professional exemptions after completing academic qualifications. It is no doubt a significant issue from the students' perspective, as it could potentially speed up the process of meeting the requirements set by professional bodies. Many professional bodies will consider students' university degree and award exemptions on certain topics. There are several implications - firstly, as a university degree does not always result in professional exemptions, it is therefore not surprising that students sometimes question the relevance of doing an academic degree. Second, some degree programmes have been designed in conjunction with professional bodies; in other words, upon successful completion of the degree, students will also have met the requirements set by the professional bodies. The difficulty is that the learning outcomes and aims of the professional bodies cannot always be directly translated into the criteria and level set by the university. For the purpose of this paper, my discussion will focus on the role of law in academic business study, namely law for business and company law.

Law for business

A typical first year Law for Business module contains usually English legal system, contract and tort. English legal system provides the introduction to the various types of legal rules which constitute the law of England and Wales - students are expected to have an appropriate level of understanding of the system, including sources of law. Contract covers the rules relating to formation, content, obligation resulting from legally binding agreements and breach of contract. In relation to tort, students are introduced to the concept of duty of care in respect of a range of business behaviour including health and safety legislation. Some might go further to include an introduction to employment law.

Students tend to view law as a distinct area. They often fail to appreciate how many different layers of law apply to our daily life. As a law lecturer it is my function to explain the fact that law is pervasive, as aptly put by Lord Wright: "Law in its own way covers the whole range of human activity - there is no side of life which it does not touch...the student of law...must appreciate the affinity of his ideas with the social, moral and economic ideas alongside of which it developed" (quoted in Gower, 1950). In the context of business studies, there is a very important need for businesses to appreciate the changing world. In brief, the main aim of the module is knowing how the law works and its impact on businesses. The intention is not to turn non-law students into lawyers but to introduce the legal environment to individuals and businesses operating within it.

Company law

Another important purpose for first year business law study is preparing students for a higher level of legal studies, such as company law on level 2 or 3. Company law potentially ranges from basic formation of a company to highly complex global corporate transactions. However, it is worth pointing out that company law and the related subject of capital market law are traditionally non-core subjects for LLB students, whereas company is a mandatory subject to business students on accounting and finance undergraduate programmes. This also applies to professional accountancy qualifications. Anyone who intends to become an accountant - whether the professional qualification in question is ACA, ACCA or CIMA - has to pass the Business and Corporate Law paper, the equivalent of a level 1 Law for Business module and level 2 Company Law module. (ACA is the qualification offered by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales, ACCA by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and CIMA by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.)

This requirement is linked to the nature of practice areas of accountants. Firms of accountants provide a wide range of fee earning services, including tax planning and corporate advisory works, to a variety of clients. Although there are firms of solicitors specialised in company law, it is usually a practice area in which the average high street solicitor is unlikely to be involved - the traditional areas are usually crime, conveyancing, matrimonial practice and personal injury. The main reason for this, arguably, is that not all companies need to worry about highly complex merger and acquisitions transactions - they do, however, need to ensure that their accounts are filed on time and tax liabilities are met. It is also essential for accountants to know where their duties lie and where their liabilities end. Accountants and auditors are from time to time associated with spectacular corporate scandals - auditors' liabilities have long been a widely and heated debate area, such as the expectation gap between what accountants actually do and public perception. If we consider the rationale put forward by UKCLE, this aspect would in effect cover issues such as accountability and application to the discipline.

Company law, by its very nature, is an area of 'law' which overlaps extensively with other business disciplines - management academics write about stakeholder interests, accounting academics are interested in the disclosure conveyed by financial accounts, human resources management (HRM) academics focus on employment relations between corporate employers and employees, marketing academics consider ways for companies to promote their products, the list goes on. A tentative division can perhaps be made between the utilisation of company law and other disciplines in that the marketing, HRM and management people work within the company concerning corporate strategy and the future business plan, whereas lawyers (whether in-house or external) are working for the company, ensuring that adequate protection is built into the transaction the company enters into. Moreover, company law is often associated with an underlying business transaction and decision.

The difficulty I wish to point out is the fact that there are inherent conflicts between these disciplines, or to put it more strongly, elements of ignorance about the other disciplines. It is therefore essential to encourage students to acquire the ability to communicate across disciplines, as this will lead to creative problem solving and work with professionals from other disciplines.

In addition, research has demonstrated that in the United States students looking at law from the perspective of whether it is useful to business people believe that both an understanding of the regulatory framework and private law principles are necessary for a career in business (Weinstein, 1999; Monseau, unpublished).

Teaching methods

My first group of students were professional students preparing for the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants' professional exam. The moment I started teaching I realised that I had not consciously considered the students' needs and 'what' I should teach them. It might sound naïve, but perhaps a majority of new lecturers started this way - I was not aware of the gap and difference between teaching law to law students and teaching law to non-law students. Several points soon dawned on me - I realised that some of these students might not be particularly interested in the subject I was teaching them.

One of the main motivations for a majority of these professional students was enhancing their job prospects or the hope of acquiring a better understanding relating to their work (accounting). After all, these were people who were pursuing a professional qualification in accounting, not law. Arguably, my own experience of studying law was therefore not applicable to them. By no means were these students less capable, they just had different aspirations. My expectation of these students' performance and study habits would therefore have to be adjusted. In other words, my teaching strategies would have to be refocused to accommodate their needs and levels.

The traditional lecture method

The conventional lecture is a largely uninterrupted one or two hours address from a lecturer. The assumption is that this teaching method involves an expert giving prepackaged knowledge to students (Le Brun & Johnstone, 1994). Traditionally, it is how law has been taught to students. A law lecture usually starts out with an explanation of the legal principle, followed by important cases which either set the 'precedent' for the principle and/or expand the principle. Facts of the cases are described and the decisions made by the judges explained.

The lecture method has often been criticised as fairly inadequate because interaction on the students' part is not usually anticipated - students are expected to listen and take notes. The down side of this way of teaching is that the lecture is essentially constituted by the lecture notes. Arguably, a lecturer could be just fulfilling the function of dictating the words contained in the lecture notes. The scenario described by Gower (1950) illustrates my point. A lecturer dashes in at five minutes past the hour, gabbles dictation until five minutes to the hour, barks forbiddingly "any questions?" and then dashes out again. Two points can easily be drawn from this article - firstly, the debate on whether or not the lecture was a good method is not new - the article was written in 1950!, and second, the scenario he described is still the norm.

There are, however, distinct advantages with the lecture method, especially in relation to legal education. It is an effective way both in terms of time and resources, such as staffing and rooming. Information can be imparted quickly to a large group of students. More significantly, a lecture is there to provide a guide and the conceptual framework for further reading, an essential part of legal education. As Gower aptly put: "the point of lectures is not to display the teacher’s learning but to encourage the student to learn".

A very substantial literature exists in the area of improving large class teaching (for example Bligh, 1998). Some general themes involve the factors of concentration span, the importance of structure, the need to create 'vicarious experience' (ie drawing on examples which relate to students' personal experience) - I have tried all of these in my lecture sessions.

Sometimes these approaches do not work out as planned. One of the experiments I conducted was based on the post-it notes method developed by Phil Race, Senior Academic Staff Development Officer at the Staff and Departmental Development Unit of the University of Leeds. When Phil came to my Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education session and introduced this method I thought it was a brilliant way of exploring students' previous knowledge. The group was given different coloured post-it notes on which different alphabet letters and numbers were written. Terms and concepts were introduced, and we were asked to write down our understanding and interpretation of them. It was then revealed that the letters and numbers would form the basis of small discussion groups in which we should have a discussion on the topics given and write down our understanding on a flip chart for presentation. We had to move around, talking to different participants. Our post-it notes would then be read out by our colleagues to the whole group.

I found this method interesting for several reasons. I do not usually raise my hand and volunteer to share my ideas with a group, because I am never sure whether I should say something or not. I can therefore appreciate that a lot of students might feel the same way. Reading out the post-it notes written by someone else takes away the uncertainty. Further, we all tend to form our little study groups. Accordingly we have missed valuable opportunities of talking to other people - the numbers and letters effectively broke down our study habits.

I tried to introduce this method in one of my level 3 Company Law modules and encountered passive resistance. Students were unwilling to move around and not happy to write down anything. They were generally very sceptical as to why I introduced the method. I have come to believe that some students - especially the less diligent ones - prefer the lecture method, either because they feel protected by the anonymity or 'invisibility' provided by sitting in a large group, or because they believe that a lecture is what learning and higher education is about - sitting in a lecture for 50 minutes and taking notes. Interaction is not something they want.

The Socratic method and the casebook method

The Socratic method in its true form is a joint inquiry in search of truth unknown to both participants in the form of a dialogue. The teacher's questions guide the student to an understanding of the nature and extent of his or her ignorance (Le Brun & Johnstone, 1994). As a teaching method, it is designed to force students to think independently and to help them participate in the process of analysing, ie breaking problems down into different components and then solving them.

In legal education the Socratic method is usually worked adjunctively with the casebook method. It is used mainly by US law schools and was pioneered by Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, requiring students to read the materials contained in casebooks before coming to a lecture, where they were required to explain the cases (Gower, 1950). The 'English version' of this approach is the tutorial. Students are asked to read cases and relevant areas, prepare for questions and come to the sessions for discussion. I have always felt that tutorials are the best way to learn, as they provide opportunities for students to raise questions and clarify ideas. In responding to questions students are required to be involved in the process of analysing the problems contained in the questions and in providing a solution. Some of my students have told me that they liked the small group feel, as it gives them valuable contact with lecturers.

I have tried to introduce the casebook method in large class lectures. The rate of success of the casebook method, as in tutorials, depends entirely on whether or not the students have read the cases and have the substantive understanding to be in the position of explaining and discussing them. In the worst scenario I have encountered students turn up not even knowing what they were supposed to do - no question, no paper, no pen! I have asked an American colleague how it would be dealt in the US if students had not read the materials - her answer was that American classrooms are generally a bit more intimidating than in the UK, and students will generally be caught out. They rely on humiliation (in her words, very effective) to encourage reading. As Gower suggested, the real difference between ours and the American system is that the Americans use casebooks to a far greater extent - I am inclined to agree with this point. Further, casebooks in the US are supplied by the lecturers, whereas this is not the norm here. Students can either purchase a cases and materials book or compile their own casebooks downloaded from law databases.

Contextual approach

I suppose, if I could, I would prefer to use the small group as my teaching norm, as this would ensure that I have sufficient contact with students to check their understanding. As this is not really an option due to resources issues such as staffing, timetabling and rooming, I have started looking at other ways of lecturing law to non-law students in the large class environment.

Historically, modules offered to business students are a diluted version of existing modules developed for law students. The content might be revised to consist of a more general nature and less detail, but the structure remains very much the same (Broadbent, 2005). Arguably, this can result in non-law students feeling disengaged from the study of law, and led me to wonder whether instead of concentrating on legal rules I could 'deconstruct' and repackage the legal materials through integrating them into students' main discipline.

The contextual approach is now generally regarded as the most appropriate way of teaching students from non-law disciplines, designing a context-based legal education which relates to their own subject area. (This approach has sometimes been described as the 'environmentalist approach', providing students with knowledge of how the legal environment impacts on business decisions - see Endeshaw, 2002.) It appealed to me because I believed it allowed me to draw on a variety of students' vicarious experiences and understandings both in their own disciplines and in their personal life - hopefully it would provoke students to become more interested in law and find it more accessible.

The approach has generated quite an extensive body of literature in relation to the topic of teaching law to non-law students. For instance, Byles and Soetendorp (2002) suggest the following factors in relation to designing a programme for non-law students:

• knowing you own values and experiences - where you are coming from
• understanding the relevance of law to the discipline we are working on
• ientifying strategies for supporting student learning that focus on context rather than content

It appears that many arguments are premised on the approach of delivering law to non-law students by designing a context-based legal education. In other words, it is presumed that the gap between legal theories, principles and their application can be bridged with accounting issues or any of the range of business issues when teaching law to business students.

When I redesigned the Company Law module this year I ensured that I built contextual links into the structure. To minimise the need for notetaking I provided a detailed module handbook outlining each lecture and the areas to be covered. I sought to provide the students with an overview of how the different topics of company law fitted into the business context, especially taking the following points into consideration:

• birth of a company - incorporation (why? what are the benefits? what are the risks?)
• running a business - directors (what do they do?), shareholders (who are they?), disputes between shareholders and directors (why?), meetings (for what purpose?), financing (for what?), auditors (what do they do?), creditors and debtors (who are they?)
• death of a company - insolvency & winding up (why? how about the company assets?)
• other issues - insider dealing (why?), corporate governance and securities regulations (why? aims?)

Instead of introducing legal principles at the beginning I asked the students to consider a scenario based on a real life small enterprise case study. As these were accounting and finance students, the idea was to encourage them to think actively and engage, drawing from their existing knowledge base, and then to provide the 'law in context' by introducing different sets of rules which come into play in their answer.

The students' response surprised and disappointed me at the same time - partly because they had difficulty understanding certain concepts which I presumed they already knew, such as the meaning of a transaction, and partly because they had difficulty applying principles that were previously taught in their own disciplines. I soon realised that the inherent problem with the argument for a contextual approach is that it is made on the assumption that business students might find it hard to perceive the links between law and their disciplines, however, they are presumed to have a satisfactory understanding of their own discipline, and, further, an interest in expanding their knowledge. My experience tells me something different - the majority of students have no problems identifying the links between law and their own discipline.

In support of this view I include here some comments from two focus groups I conducted in early 2005 with the aim of giving business students an opportunity to comment on their experiences learning law. Particular emphasis was placed on accounting and finance students, as that is the largest group (100+ level 2 students), and company law is their core module. The guide for the focus group contained a range of questions to ascertain the students' academic level - why they had chosen the programme and the challenges they faced in studying law. The questions were the same for both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Question: Can you see the link between law and your chosen course of study?

Answers:

• Yes, there is [a] link but I don’t like too [much] details and case law.
• Yes, law surrounds everything we do in life - every job, social situation, family situation, it’s not just important for accounting.
• Yes, totally. Business and law is a good combination on different level such as accounting setting up a business - the rights of employees/shareholders.
• Yes - the memorandum and articles of association are particularly linked with the financial accounts - it gives you more knowledge about the regulation behind the company.
• Most definitely - law has its own jargon but it is very relevant for any business actually since anyone forming business relationships and contacts will have to have a good understanding of law, particular contracts.
• Yes - I am just beginning to see a strong link between the two - it makes the course more interesting.

So far it was rather positive, but when I asked them whether they would have chosen company law if it was not compulsory, their answers were less encouraging, with only 29% responding yes, 36% responding no and 35% with "maybe/not sure".

This evidence leads me to think that the difficulty of teaching business students might have little to do with students' difficulties establishing the links between law and their own programme. Two additional conclusions which have either been mentioned or confirmed by the feedback from my students can be tentatively drawn:

1. Some students do not necessarily understand or even enjoy their own discipline. I was informed by some students that they chose to study a discipline that presents a promising and safe career prospect rather than one they find interesting. Accordingly, it is hard to motivate them to think in context.
2. They find reading law difficult - some students raised their view about the 'jargon' and "too much detail and case law".

Another unforeseen problem I experienced with the contextual approach is that some students are not receptive to this method. I have recently been told during students' feedback that they could not understand why I had structured my company law lectures in such a way. They expected to come in and take notes and for the lecturer to provide a list of things they need to take away from 50 minutes of lecture. This exact point had been previously made by Kraft: "students tend to disengage from genuine involvement and ‘come to believe that learning is the same as note taking" (Le Brun & Johnstone, 1994).

Using some more novel approaches I have found students surprisingly conservative in their beliefs and approaches to what they perceive as 'learning' - whether it is due to their expectations of how a lecture should be or whether they are used to a certain way of teaching based on their previous experience is open to interpretation. Teaching method, although important, in my view, is only part of the wider issue. There are additional factors such as the approach to problem solving, the 'languages' associated with disciplines, the style of writing and presenting, and ultimately the students' perception of a particular subject that need to be considered.

Identifying the issues

To start my discussion I would ask you to read the question I have set for my level 3 company students:

I did not anticipate how many questions and comments I would receive from students, ranging from "what are academic views" or "proprietary interests" to whether the quotation was "accurate" because it was so "wordy". After spending 30 minutes explaining the question I began to reflect upon some of the issues I have been considering derived from the academic tribe arguments as noted above.

Legal language and presentation

We often encourage students to read judgments found in law reports. Students have, however, made the comment as to how difficult it is to understand legal language. They argue that it is too challenging to read the law reports let along to understand them. True, a much remarked feature of legal writing is its perceived dryness and a particular way of expressing thoughts. As Vick (2004) suggests, once disciplinary boundaries were settled, each of the disciplines evolved their own modes of 'discourse'. In part, he argues that discourse is simply a matter of vocabulary. All students have to acquire a certain disciplinary vocabulary when they commence their study, irrespective of the discipline involved. Provided students can be introduced to legal language, it should not present too much of a problem. However, discourse also reflects modes of thought, reinforced by cultural practices and institutional frameworks, through which groups come to construct an understanding of the world (Vick, 2004). These are academic conventions rooted in disciplines.

The differences in academic conventions are actually greater than people realise - partly this is because of a lack of understanding of other disciplines. Academics are usually unaware of the conventions in other disciplines. The language of citation and reference methods would be one example - business academics swear on Harvard, lawyers have their own footnotes referencing system. (The footnotes referencing system is then further developed into different dialects. For example, the Blue Book used by American lawyers, the Red Book for Canada, Oxford referencing in the UK.) As Balkin argued, members of a discipline adopt a certain "body of learning, a style, a set of approaches and a mechanism of problem formation, recognition and solution". This can be translated into the different skills we encourage students to develop in relation to specific disciplines.

Moreover, students are also expected to present their knowledge and understanding in a certain way. This is a common problem experienced by students who embark on degree programmes which contain courses that do not form part of their main academic disciplines - they are often told to follow different conventions associated with certain disciplines.

A law student's perception of 'presentation skill' is very different from a business student's interpretation. Many business students write their assignments in the fashion of a report, which is not the desired form for a piece of legal writing, but would be the acceptable format for a business assignment. The style of writing is more casual. Admittedly, legal language and conventions can be mastered. But students often fail to provide the crucial ingredient of legal education - identifying legal issues and providing the necessary analysis. Again, I am 'the other', requiring students to perform tasks which are sequenced and structured differently to those in their main discipline.

Think like a lawyer: deep and surface learning in relation to legal education

Legal education seeks to encourage students to ‘think’ like a lawyer. But what does this mean? The development of skills of critical analysis is probably the most important aspect of university education - there is no doubt that all graduates should be equipped with the necessary skills to solve complex problems, whether the problems in questions are economics, business decisions or politics. It could be said that in the context of legal education, students are encouraged to ‘think’ like a lawyer by developing the ability of spotting and analysing issues in order to tackle a problem, identify relevant facts and give appropriate advice after considering possible arguments from both sides. The essence of it, as Cownie (2004) aptly put it, is that "law is an argument not a statement, it is to be debated and discussed".

We use problem scenario and essay questions to assess students in this regard. The difficulty is that this does not translate well into disciplines that are numeracy predominated, such as accounting and most of the business subjects. Arguably, students can apply a set of rules and solve the problem without analysing why the rules are there. But the common dilemma for business students is knowing where to begin - how to tackle questions, what are the legal issues and what should be included?

It is interesting to consider the well known theory of deep and surface learning approaches in relation to legal education. The surface learning approach termed by Marton & Säljö (1976) fittingly describes the surface learners' attitude - they memorise all relevant cases and legislation but do not really understand the legal issues contained in the question nor how to apply law to the problem scenario. The students just regurgitate the information they have read without proper understanding. Deep learners treat cases and legislation more than just 'text', and try to understand the underlying concerns and policies, the implications and their effect on society.

Critics of the 'deep' and 'surface' approach learning note that the learner frequently appears as "an anonymous decontextualised, degendered being whose principle distinguishing characteristics are 'personality' and 'learning style' or 'approach to learning'" (Malcolm & Zukas, 2001). The approach does not provide further explanation as to why certain students struggle while others grasp concepts with ease, nor does it provide a satisfactory description as to how people 'think' in a particular discipline, or why certain knowledge could be particularly 'troublesome'. This is where the notion of threshold concepts and ‘troublesome knowledge’, developed by Meyer & Land, seems to be particularly useful.

Threshold concepts are defined as "concepts that bind a subject together, being fundamental to ways of thinking and practising in that discipline". It was suggested by Meyer & Land (2003) that:

“Once a student has internalised a threshold concept they are more able to integrate different aspects of a subject in their analysis of problems. Students who have not yet internalised a threshold concept have little option but to attempt to learn new ideas in a more fragmented fashion. On acquiring a threshold concept a student is able to transform their use of the ideas of a subject because they are now able to integrate them in their thinking. The integrative aspect of a threshold concept presents distinctive problems for learners who are studying a subject as part of their degree.”

Accordingly, students who do not think of themselves as 'learners' of the given subject are likely to face particular difficulties in grasping "concepts that bind together aspects of a subject that may seem quite disparate to a novice" (Meyer & Land, 2005). The important factor is that the threshold concepts could equally apply to law students, as it is the acquisition of such concepts which is intrinsic to grasping the ways in which lawyers 'think' and practise. As Meyer & Land (2005) note:

“Integration and subsequent transformation may prove troublesome because it demands an integration of ideas, and this requires the student to accept a transformation of their own understanding. Students can remain stuck in an 'in-between' state which [Meyer and Land] termed as 'liminality', ie within the threshold.”

Should students remain liminal they acquire a partial, limited and superficial understanding. The suggestion is that a 'supportive liminal environment' should be created to help students through such difficulty, identifying the barriers and freeing up the blocked spaces by redesigning the sequences of course delivery so that students are enabled to negotiate such transitions more successfully.

Conclusion

We acknowledge that law teaching to business students should be structured differently, however, by looking closer into the established arguments of promoting a context-based approach, adopting a teaching method and redesigning the course we have failed to solve the existing problems of teaching business students. Teaching methods, although relevant and important, only play an ancillary role and cannot address the underlying issues such as the different language and conventions adopted in each discipline. 'Threshold concepts' provide an analytically helpful way of understanding the underlying problems.

Is it therefore perhaps time to rethink academic disciplines formed by different academic tribes by adopting a more integrative approach? If we take away the academic boundaries to focus on one core issue, identify the skills we feel that students should be equipped with and reconstruct the subject into a module integrated into relevant academic disciplines, will it produce a different result?

This approach may not appear achievable. One of the reasons is, as Hoskin & Anderson-Gough (2004) pointed out, that "what had undermined the integrative intent was the continued power of disciplinary specialisation in terms of content offered". Second are the logistics of launching and running the module. In 2005 I developed a module consisting of subjects concerning migrant workers with my business school colleagues, which could fit into law, business studies and economics courses. Although the module has generated a great deal of interest, our problem now is finding a home for it. It can only work with active participation from all three disciplines, but, logistically, it is difficult to launch a module which requires resources from three schools. However, it does present a new dimension as to how future courses should be structured and whether or not our perception of how the structure of our degree programmes in general could be changed.

References and bibliography

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Biography of Vida Allen

Vida started working at Kingston in 2003 as a part time lecturer, becoming full time in 2004. Her teaching and research interests are in company and financial law, with a further interest in legal education. She is module leader for company law on the BA Accounting and Business programmes, while at the postgraduate level she teaches on the LLM and MA in Corporate Governance programmes. Vida is also a Faculty member of the University Academic Board.