Education – Page 18 – Turtle Talk

Law Students: Enter the LSAC 2017 Diversity Writing Competition to win $5000

January 11, 2017Wenona Singel

This year’s LSAC Diversity Writing Competition topic is “Why Pipeline Programs Targeting Students from Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds are Essential to the Future of the Legal Profession.” Current JD candidates are invited to submit papers addressing this topic. The deadline for submissions is Friday, March 31, 2017, and LSAC will award three $5000 prizes to the best paper submitted by a 1L, 2L, and 3L/4L. In addition, one winner will have a chance to publish their entry in the Journal of Legal Education.

We know there are law students following Turtle Talk who could write excellent papers on this topic. LSAC’s rules for submissions are here.

EdWeek: Commentary on Indigenous Ed in Alaska

November 30, 2016Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here is “Alaska Is Failing Its Indigenous Students” by Evon Parker.

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz: “The Miseducation of Native American Students”

November 28, 2016November 28, 2016Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

In Education Week, here.

An excerpt:

While distortions and myths of Native American culture plague many schools, textbooks often fail to mention Native history after the 19th century. In a 2015 study, scholars Antonio Castro, Ryan Knowles, Sarah Shear, and Gregory Soden examined the state standards for teaching Native American history and culture in all 50 states and found that 87 percent of references to American Indians are in a pre-1900s context.

Director of Student Services and Skills Posting for Lakehead University

October 20, 2016Sarah M Donnelly

One contract position (three-year term), Thunder Bay Campus

Highly organized and possessing excellent interpersonal skills, you will play a key role in the administration of our legal program. Working closely with the Dean, you will be responsible for providing the coordination of services for student recruitment and retention, delivering the Integrated Practice Curriculum (IPC), assisting course instructors with developing skills-exercise content for their courses, coordinating the third-year Practice Placement program with legal supervisors, and offering career support for upper level students.

You have a JD or LL.B. degree and three years of legal practice experience. Ideally, you possess membership in the Law Society of Upper Canada, have knowledge of Indigenous communities, and have previous experience with post-secondary administration, program development, and/or post-secondary instructional delivery. Collaborative and able to work with individuals of various backgrounds, you have outreach experience with law firms, legal departments in government organizations, and other community legal entities. Some travel is required.

This position is an initial three-year full-time contract with potential for renewal and is subject to budgetary approval. Salary is commensurate with experience. If you are interested in applying, please submit your curriculum vitae and cover letter outlining your experience to:

Lakehead University – Office of Human Resources
University Centre
Room UC-0003
fax: 807-346-7701
e-mail: careers@lakeheadu.ca

The deadline for applications is December 9, 2016. If you have questions about this position, please feel free to contact, Dean EagleWoman at lawfaculty@lakeheadu.ca.

Lakehead University is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and welcomes applications from all qualified individuals including women, members of visible minorities, Aboriginal persons, and persons with disabilities. If you require accommodations for interviews or other meetings, please contact Human Resources at (807) 343-8334. We appreciate your interest; however, only those selected for an interview will be notified.

Aboriginal & Indigenous Law Faculty Posting for Lakehead University

October 18, 2016Sarah M Donnelly

Tenure Track Position – Aboriginal and Indigenous Law Curriculum

Lakehead University’s Bora Laskin Faculty of Law invites applications for a tenure track position to teach within the Aboriginal and Indigenous Law curriculum. Rank of appointment is commensurate with qualifications, teaching, and research. The appointment will commence on July 1, 2017. Review of applications will begin on November 15, 2016 and continue until the position is filled. Aboriginal and Indigenous candidates are encouraged to apply.

The ideal candidate will have teaching and research expertise in Indigenous legal traditions. Given the Faculty’s presence in Anishinaabe and Métis territory, preference will be given to qualified candidates with research and teaching expertise in either Anishinaabe law or Métis law or both. The Faculty invites candidates to discuss their experience engaging with the language, worldview, traditions, and protocols of an Indigenous people, and the ways in which their teaching and research address the relationship between Indigenous laws and Indigenous languages, worldviews, traditions, and protocols, where such is the case. The Faculty encourages applications from candidates who employ Indigenous pedagogy in their teaching, including land-based pedagogy.

The Bora Laskin Faculty of Law has a tripartite mandate, which includes a focus on Aboriginal and Indigenous law, natural resources and environmental law, and rural and small firm practice. The Faculty’s Integrated Practice Curriculum incorporates the requirement of articling into the Faculty’s three-year program. The Law Society of Upper Canada has approved the Integrated Practice Curriculum; as a result, successful graduates may be called to the bar in Ontario without completing a separate period of articles. Our faculty have experience practicing law, and many of our courses include skills-based exercises. The Faculty encourages applications from those who have experience in the practice of Indigenous law, and who can incorporate Indigenous skills exercise into their courses.

Applicants must have a law degree, and preference will be given to those who also have a graduate degree in law. Complete applications will consist of the following:

a cover letter that includes a teaching and research statement;
a curriculum vitae,
Law transcripts;
up to two samples of published research; and,
the names and email addresses of three referees.

Complete applications should be sent to:
Dean Angelique EagleWoman
Bora Laskin Faculty of Law
Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1
e-mail: lawfaculty@lakeheadu.ca

If you have questions about this position, please feel free to contact Dean EagleWoman, at lawfaculty@lakeheadu.ca. Review of the applications will begin November 15, 2016 and continue until the positions are filled.

A completed Confirmation of Eligibility to Work in Canada form should be submitted with the application.

Lakehead University is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and welcomes applications from all qualified individuals including women, members of visible minorities, Aboriginal persons, and persons with disabilities. We appreciate your interest; however, only those selected for an interview will be notified. Lakehead University is committed to supporting an accessible environment. Please ask us how we may help you by contacting the Office of Human Resources, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Room UC0003, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1 (807) 343-8334 or e-mail human.resources@lakeheadu.ca.

“Perils of Indigenous People’s Day”

October 10, 2016Matthew L.M. Fletcher3 Comments

From the San Francisco Chronicle.

An excerpt:

So when Penn State social studies Professor Sarah Shear examined state history standards around the country in 2014, she found that 87 percent of references to Native Americans in the standards addressed their history before 1900. And not a single state included content about present-day native peoples.

When Shear asked her undergraduate students what they knew about Native Americans, unsurprisingly, they referred only to the woes that native peoples had endured. “They were coming to college believing that all Indians are dead,” Shear noted.

Rodina Cave Parnall Joining American Indian Law Center, Inc.

October 7, 2016Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Here (PDF):

cave-parnall-joins-ailc-press-release

Guest Post by Jay Rosner: Confronting the LSAT

September 21, 2016Sarah M Donnelly

Matthew Fletcher has recently written, “The market for Indian lawyers has never been greater in the history of American law, and it is likely to keep growing for the foreseeable future.” While the general market for lawyers has been shrinking since even before the recession of 2008, American Indian students now have expanding opportunities in law that were unthinkable only a decade or two ago.

The LSAT is, for many Native prelaw students, the single most formidable impediment on the path to law school. It is a key to admission to selective law schools, and a lever to what financial aid is available. How can Native prelaws best overcome the LSAT barrier?

In order to get their best LSAT scores, Native students need access to high-quality LSAT prep courses. A few prelaws can prepare effectively without an LSAT prep teacher, but most will get their best scores under the guidance of an expert instructor.

Many more American Indian students could benefit from high-quality LSAT prep, which tends to be expensive, if funding were made available to subsidize it. A good model is the Native American Pipeline to Law Initiative, which provides intensive, subsidized LSAT prep courses to its participants. This is probably the single most effective targeted investment available to increase the number of competitive Native law school applicants. Much more of this funding is needed.

Anyone with a suggestion of a funding source to support LSAT prep for Native students should contact Jay Rosner of The Princeton Review Foundation, at JayR@review.com.

LSAT prep is much closer to a training process than to a purely educational process. A good analogy is having a tennis coach – someone with experience and expertise who can teach, observe, monitor and fine-tune technique in a way that an individual may have difficulty doing on his/her own. The great tennis players all have coaches – none of them rely on themselves to improve and perfect their technique. Having an LSAT prep “coach” is similar.

The LSAT puts a premium on test-taking technique and speed. The LSAT is essentially a reading bubble test, favoring strong, fast readers with lots of exposure to challenging reading material. It requires that students be able to handle text and deductive reasoning in very particular ways. The task for LSAT takers is to leverage their reading ability and become very quick at accurately answering LSAT questions, by learning and perfecting test-taking techniques in the 2 to 3-month period right before the test. Note that every affluent prelaw has an expert LSAT prep teacher guiding him/her.

A secondary focal point with a much smaller investment would be to develop a cadre of Native LSAT prep teachers who could serve as role models for success on the test. An LSAT prep teacher need be neither a law student nor a lawyer, although those folks bring additional credibility. An effective LSAT teacher needs to be able to get a very high score on the LSAT and also needs to be able to and want to successfully communicate with and guide students to get their best LSAT score. In fact, most of the better LSAT teachers today are neither lawyers nor law students. Often they have done very well on the SAT and GRE, particularly the reading sections of those tests, and then they take a practice LSAT and decide that they would like to teach that test.

The first step for a prospective Native LSAT prep teacher is to take a carefully timed practice LSAT and get a high score. The next step would be to attend an intensive LSAT prep training conducted by a master LSAT instructor to determine if the candidate is able to effectively teach LSAT techniques to students. I’ve been able to place some Native teacher candidates into excellent SAT and ACT teacher trainings conducted by The Princeton Review, but I’ve not yet been able to place even one Native LSAT prep teacher candidate. I’d like to.

As a long-term critic of the LSAT, I could write a lengthy essay on what I consider to be the LSAT’s faults. Let it suffice to say here that the LSAT is flawed, limited, skewed, too speeded and addresses only a couple of the many skills that a successful law student and successful lawyer needs. The LSAT does not come close to predicting success in law school; in fact, it only helps in a very small way to predict first year law school grade point average, which is not very much at all. Despite that, law schools put way too much weight on the LSAT in admissions, requiring applicants to prioritize LSAT prep. American Indian students need to take up the challenge, confront the LSAT, try to access an LSAT prep course and get their best score.

Wherever there are serious discussions of Indian Law and the legal profession, enlarging the pipeline for Native lawyers in general, and assisting Native prelaws with the LSAT in particular, should be addressed. The Indian Law Section of the Federal Bar Association, the National Native American Bar Association, the Indigenous Peoples Section of the American Bar Association, the National Congress of American Indians and state and local Native American Bar Associations are the kinds of organizations that should grapple with this regularly. Current members and alumni of Native American Law Student Associations at law schools also have a role to play in expanding the pipeline for Native lawyers.