Ask Your Students
by
Louis J. Sirico, Jr.

Several years ago, as I prepared to teach my Torts class, I decided to include some recent cases on the deprogramming of converts to controversial religions. In these cases, the courts generally find no false imprisonment on the part of individuals who capture the converts and attempt to change their newly formed convictions. I expected to conclude that the converts had the right to make their own decisions about their lives, even if most people considered those decisions to be foolish.

In class, it occurred to me to ask my students if any of them had been involved with new religions. One student immediately volunteered that her family had arranged to have her brother deprogrammed. The class sat perfectly silent as she told the story of how her brother's personality had radically changed after joining a religious group and how her family's anguish had led it to take such dramatic action. Needless to say, my class took an unexpected turn that day as we heard a personal perspective on a controversial issue.

My Torts class would have learned less that day if I had not asked the students to contribute their experiences. Although this teaching technique is an obvious one, I have wondered why it took me so long to discover it. Perhaps because we see ourselves as teachers who both impart knowledge and control the class, we hesitate to invite students to share these roles with us. Yet, by taking a fairly small risk, we can add immeasurably to the classroom experience.

Here is another example. In a Land Use Planning course, I was teaching Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon and Keystone Bituminous Coal Assn. v. DeBenedictis, two famous cases concerning the Fifth Amendment's restriction on taking property. In these cases, Pennsylvania tried to prevent coal companies from mining in a way that would cause homes and towns on the surface to collapse. One student told us that her grandfather had died in a mining disaster. When the coal company recovered his body, its employees dumped it on his front porch and left. This poignant story illustrated two points: how dangerous mining can be and how impossible it must have been for the state to negotiate some sort of agreement about mining practices with such insensitive companies.

Even when students offer less striking stories, they can add much to a class. Asking students about landlord and tenant problems guarantees a wealth of woeful tales of lost security deposits, difficult roommates, contentious neighbors, and harried and harrying landlords. This year, I am taking one more step by inviting one of my students from last year to discuss her summer experience in an office serving low-income tenants.

I regularly ask my class if any of them have been the subject of a deposition or cross-examination. A few students always volunteer and describe unpleasant experiences. Without these stories, most students have no idea what it is like to be a client or witness in litigation. Most of the traditional classroom discussion on the subject is quite bloodless. Moreover, the portrayal that students receive from television and movies is so overdramatized that it does not give a fair picture. For example, students have no idea how exhausting it is to be deposed or how nervous clients get anticipating the ordeal. As a result of the students' narratives, the rest of the class gains some sensitivity to how clients and witnesses may feel and why negotiation or mediation is often worth pursuing.

Students are also helpful in contributing factual information. For example, in my Property class, I often teach cases that took place on the West Coast. I regularly ask students if they have any firsthand knowledge about the town or area where the controversy occurred. Students often relate interesting facts and insights unknown to me and to other Easterners at my Pennsylvania law school.

Asking students to contribute their knowledge and experiences has proven to yield great rewards. The writer Norman Brown declared, "What education does is to put a series of filters over your awareness so that year by year . . . you experience less and less." By making education more of a shared experience, we remove some of those filters.