Legal Education, Innovation and Practice

Dr Stella Coyle has led the development of Legal Essentials, Keele Law School’s innovative approach to induction and legal skills. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has a keen interest in legal education and student wellbeing – particularly at the point of transition to higher education.

Stella has presented her work at the Association of Law Teachers conference and has been an invited speaker at events held by the Legal Education Research Network (LERN); Connecting Legal Education; and Advancing Wellness in Law.

She has publications forthcoming in The Law Teacher Special Edition: Legal Education for Well-Being: Design, Delivery and Evaluation and in the collection edited by Jess Guth and Jennifer McCloy, Empowering Law Students.

Stella previously trained as an integrative psychotherapist, which included work at a university counselling service. This experience has informed her current research into Shame and the Law School: Observation, Relationship, and the Developing Self.

Stella currently supervises Aysha Mazhar, PhD candidate researching compassion in legal academia.

Sonja draws on her experience as a solicitor to help students widen their understanding of legal theory. Using the vehicles of both the Commercial Legal Advice Clinic and life-like assessment methods in the Civil Litigation module, she seeks to embed experiential learning into her teaching. Sonja is a Fellow of the HEA.

Aysha Mazhar is a PhD candidate who is currently researching the manifestations of compassion in legal academia of England and Wales. She is particularly interested in the working lives of the legal academic and how compassion can exist in the more visible facets of the academy, such as in law teaching and legal research but also in the more hidden, underappreciated sides, such as emotional labour, pastoral care, and the academic self. Aysha has published reviews of two books:

• Key directions in legal education: national and international perspectives (Emma Jones and Fiona Cownie eds), Routledge 2020 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03069400.2020.1776007
• Towards the compassionate university: from golden thread to global impact (Kathryn Waddington ed), Routledge 2021 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071005.2021.193686

Aysha is supervised by Dr Stella Coyle.

Assessment and Feedback in Law

Project Leaders:

• Stella Coyle (LEIP Cluster Lead)
• Mark Davys (UG Programme Director)
• Lara McMurtry (Director of Education)

Building on the Law School’s participation in the Advance HE collaborative project on Assessment and Feedback in Law, the School will engage in a comprehensive, pedagogically informed, programme level review of UG assessment and assessment strategy. Co-ordinated by The School’s Education Committee, engaging colleagues within the School’s LEIP Cluster, and fostering student contribution from the outset, the project will aim to remodel assessment and feedback policy and practice in Law, focusing explicitly on student progression and attainment and equality of opportunity for learners from underrepresented backgrounds.

The project is funded by Keele’s Teaching Innovation Projects Scheme.