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Transactional Legal Learning on the Web

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

Paul Maharg
Affiliation:
Paul Maharg is a senior lecturer in law in the Law School of the University of Strathclyde and Co-Director of the Legal Practice Courses in the Glasgow Graduate School of Law. He is responsible for all aspects of curriculum development on the Diploma in Legal Practice and the Professional Competence Course. He teaches on both courses. His research fields include legal education, legal critique and nineteenth-century Scottish jurisprudence. Paul Maharg can be contacted at T:0141 548 4946 and email paul.maharg@strath.ac.uk

Extract

‘Transactional learning’ at its simplest means learning from doing transactions. When professionals learn they often do so, as Donald Schön reminds us, by learning from within transactions – ‘knowing-in-action’. By this Schön means that professionals solve problems by constructing for themselves a repertoire of precedents, images and remembered actions. Problems are not solved by using rules alone, but are framed or constructed according to the repertoire. Professionals try out solutions for fit, re-frame, feed back to themselves, try out other solutions. The result is what Schön calls ‘;reflection-in-action’. According to him, this is what produces the doctor's “feel’ for a specific diagnosis, or a lawyer's ‘feel’ for a case, (Schon 1983).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 2002

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