From soup to something else: what my brilliant students came up with when given half a chance
Transformative, creative pedagogies are urgently needed in legal education. Far from the cutting-edge of pedagogical practice, legal education is heavily shaped by conservative notions of ‘professionalism’. This, in turn, has often constrained the pedagogical imagination of staff who teach in the field. Where cutting-edge practices are present, they are rarely captured in literature on legal education. Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are pushing for changes in legal education that could enable students to learn differently, creating forms of ‘professionalism’ that demonstrate a deep commitment to social justice and inclusivity. In this blog series, Who said that learning law is boring? Bringing Creative Teaching Methods into Legal Education, we explore how arts-based, affective and embodied teaching methods can deepen students’ learning of law and enrich socio-legal teaching. These blogs start from the premise that everyone is creative, and that taking creative approaches to legal education can build critical analytical, vocational, and civic skills. Read more about the blog series and our motivations here.
Rose Sydney Parfitt, Kent Law School.
Keywords: teaching, making, creative methods, materiality, international law
I gave up on the written word last year – or on the academically written word, at least. Asking my students to write essays, let alone read them, was getting none of us anywhere. Clearly, I needed to ask them for something else. This wasn’t exactly a comfortable decision – but then again, I didn’t make this world, and nor did they. The show has to go on. I just wasn’t sure if this something else was going to work.
I am, after all, an academic of Gen-X vintage, meaning that university for me revolved entirely around processing large numbers of words printed on large quantities of paper. I remember spending hours wandering around the library stacks, crumpled reading list in hand, cursing the LCC and sometimes weeping pitifully, until – finally – I identified the correct book, or the correct issue of the correct volume of the correct journal and (so long as no-one had lost it or, indeed, cut the pages out) spirited it off to the copy room.
Nobody can call that an efficient system, but it definitely had its upsides. Apart from anything else, having to go through this arduous process every time I needed information of any kind meant that, by the time I got to my seminar, or started work on my next essay, I knew my readings by form, if not necessarily by substance. In the panic of the awkward classroom silence or the looming deadline, I often found that it had left some clues behind. I might remember the obscure stack in which I’d found a particular book, for example; or how I’d liked the font; or how it had smelled. Most importantly, having been carried about from café to pub to club, each of my readings by this point would be mangled in its own distinctive way. Flashing, at random, through my underslept brain, these tiny formal memories would sometimes drag a little bit of substance along with them, or cross paths in unexpected ways. Sometimes they still do.
In short, the physical process of finding, photocopying and scribbling all over the things I was reading gave me a sense of what they were before I even started trying to work out what they said. In turn, this made the task of producing something a little bit like them myself, in the form of an essay or even an exam (the only forms of assessment that ever came my way) not exactly straightforward, but plausible, at least.
In their digitised journey through university, by contrast, my students don’t seem to come across many of these kinds of clues and subconscious signposts. When (if) they open up the Moodle folders that have been populated for them so painstakingly, what they find is what they’ve always found: another long list of pdfs with virtually nothing, in a material sense, to distinguish them one from the other, and almost no way of accessing them except via a screen – the same screen on which everything else happens. No wonder they find the reading overwhelming. I’m starting to feel the same.
As for the writing, the essay as a means of assessment is kaput, as far as I can see. Certainly, there are pedagogically productive ways of using AI in existence. However, asking Claude for another 2,500-word batch of grammatically-impeccable, analytically-circular, substantively-vacant words surely can’t be one of them. Nonetheless, dead as the written assessment might be, it definitely wasn’t students who killed it. On the contrary, the idea that laziness lies behind the AI-generated essay is an incredibly dated assumption, as anyone who’s done a stint on the Board of Examiners will know. Laziness is a luxury that’s simply no longer available to most of the students I come across. The pressures they’re facing are real, multiple and complex. They are also largely invisible to a now all-but-privatised higher education system that continues, even so, to stake everything, and to rank everyone, on a single, final mark. The crushing anxiety produced by the debt most students are now graduating with – nearly £48,000, on average, in 2025-2026 – is only one example. In an emotional sense, this debt puts goal of a glittering 2:1 roughly on a par with the ₩45.6 billion cash prize in Squid Game. If I’d spent my undergraduate years under that kind of financial pressure, would I have had the self-assurance to turn my back on a tool capable (in theory) of synthesising – in a matter of seconds – everything ever written in response to the question I’d been asked to discuss? Unlikely.
Aside from inputs and outputs, however, as the convenor of Kent Law School’s international law 1.01 module I also had another problem on my hands last Spring. For decades, the aim of the game for critical teachers of public international law has been how to crack the discipline’s shiny utopian veneer and convince students to stop asking how to make international law more efficient at saving the world and start asking whether international law might actually be the thing that screwed it up. By 2026, however, the champions of the so-called ‘rule-based international order’ were doing that job for us. With most European and Anglo-settler-state governments strenuously defending Israel’s expanding genocide in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and beyond, and with the US blitzing fishing boats, abducting sitting heads of state, planning to annex neighbouring territories and threatening to annihilate ‘entire civilisations’ overnight – all in the name of international law – I could hardly walk into the lecture-hall, start discussing, say, Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and expect my students to find that in any way plausible, let alone interesting. None of us had any idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, least of all me.
There was clearly only one solution: we’d have to do it differently and we’d have to do it together. And so, with a lot of help from my friends,[1] I ripped it up and started again. Rather than explaining what international law was and showing them how to apply it to the world, I decided to invite my students to explain the world – their world – and its intersections with international law to me. Instead of forcing them to get their information primarily from linear scholarly texts, I decided that we would try choosing, watching, listening to and looking at other kinds of materials as a collective (films in particular, but also Tweets, plays, maps, songs, adverts, photographs etc) and brainstorming what they could tell us about what we needed to know together. Rather than insisting that a long, painful essay would be the only means through which they could demonstrate, and be assessed on, what they’d learned and understood, I decided to let my students choose what kind of work they’d like to submit and then invited them to explain why they’d made whatever they’d made to their peers.
I knew it was going to be fun. But was it going to work, in a pedagogical sense? Going into it, I really wasn’t sure. However, by the Week 1 my students had torpedoed all my pre-digital dogmatism with the sheer enthusiasm with which they embraced the opportunity to learn on their own terms. In almost 20 years of teaching, at all kinds of different institutions, I’ve never seen a cohort so engaged with what they were learning. Nor is opening the Turnitin submissions box at marking time usually a moment any of us look forward to. This year, however, the box was full of surprises – inventive, original, insightful, hilarious, sometimes harrowing, but always surprising, in the best possible way. I found recipes, maps, collages, documentaries, drawings, paintings and video games in that box. There were diaries and dance routines in there; cycle routes, manifestos, posters, animations, interactive museums, magazine layouts, diagrams of football stadiums, cupcakes and more.
One student investigated the legal dimensions of India’s subjection to British rule through a photographic timeline of the saree blouse. The story she told, of the colonial authorities’ imposition, in the name of modesty, of this modified European blouse on Indian women between the generations of her great-grandmother and her grandmother, was a story of sartorial diversity, multiplicity and flexibility altered irrevocably by the introduction of an alien uniform characterised by straight seams reflecting fixed borders. Another submitted ten ‘beautiful and broken’ international law-themed nail art designs. Still another member of this cohort handed in a 16-part orchestral composition, together with an annotated score detailing how its acts and elements came together to chronicle the journey of a colonised people towards self-determination. The piece begins with ‘a Mixolydian, simple triadic harmony and a sustained drone [which] creates a musical language that feels inherited rather than constructed, evoking indigenous traditions passed through generations and preceding’ any ‘legal classification of statehood’, its composer explained. In Act 2, however, a clashing ‘¾ waltz’ superimposes itself on top of the original 4/4 time-signature, referencing ‘the imposition of Western legal frameworks’ under colonialism. Even after independence in Act 3, the ‘folk orchestra’ struggles to overcome this ‘inherited’ ¾ tempo, reflecting the ongoing tension ‘between [the right of peoples to self-determination] and the preservation of colonial borders under uti possidetis juris’, this student explained, noting that she ‘chose conflicting metres rather than competing melodies’ here ‘because the legal tension lies in competing views on authority and sovereignty rather than existence’.
These are only a few examples of the brilliant ideas my students came up with in response to the module’s prompts, propelled forwards by an impulse to read/watch/listen extensively, and to think critically, that seemed to come naturally as soon as they were given the freedom to engage with what we were studying on their own terms and make sense of it in relation to their own lives. I just wish I’d had the courage to try this before. This was an experiment that demonstrated – to all of us, I think – the value of making to the practice of thinking with feeling; to the practice of thinking slowly, precisely, critically and non-judgementally. As the painter John Ruskin put it, in his ultra-nineteenth-century way: ‘Habits of patient comparison and accurate judgment will make your art precious, as they will make your actions wise’. Requiring the artist, as it does, to look and listen as carefully, and as humbly, as possible, in other words, for Ruskin the process of drawing teaches empathy by definition. I think the same could be said of the process of making in general.
With that in mind, I’d like to finish with one more intervention from my students – one that, on the surface, might seem too mundane to count as an ‘arts-based method’. Responding to our work on the ICJ’s Chagos Islands Advisory Opinion and to the UK’s appalling treatment of the Chagossian people in general, the student in question – an overseas student from Thailand, as it happens – decided to stage an intersection between international law and his own life by finding out what a typical Chagossian dish might be and making it. The recipe he found, in a video on YouTube, was for Bouyon Pwason Kri – a broth made of the plentiful fish found in the Chagos Islands’ famous lagoons. As soon as he embarked on the process of actually preparing it, however, ‘I immediately ran into the same problem thousands of Chagossian[s] in the UK face’, he explained. ‘You cannot get the same Chagos fish here nor can you get the citruses, You can only approximate.’ Nor, when the soup was ready, did he have any means by which to gauge the proximity of his approximation – whether the taste was more-or-less right; whether the texture would do, and so on: ‘I have no reference to whether the recipe I found is truly authentic or not because of the vanishing of the culture and the people of Chagos’, he said. The whole absorbing but frustrating process ‘made me think about the survival of culture under displacement. The difficulty of procuring the correct ingredients makes it easy for the dish to assimilate with the culture of the country the people who cook it are in, and since there is no homeland left for the Chagossian [people] if the dish is gone it is gone forever’.
There are many things we could learn from this project, as from all the others, but it brought one thing home to me, in particular. Scholarly texts can take us a long way in terms of learning, but if we really want our students to appreciate the gap between rights and realities – between law and life – nothing could be more powerful than the making of an uncertain, impossible bowl of soup.
![Figure 6: Jeena Lumumba, 'Exploring the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination Through Music’ (original composition [fragments from the annotated score], 2026).](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e5792d_58bca50f0f3a43ed83732f113bef5074~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_562,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/e5792d_58bca50f0f3a43ed83732f113bef5074~mv2.png)
Figure 5: Jeena Lumumba, 'Exploring the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination Through Music’, passage from 'Act 1: Existence' (digital audio file, 2026).
[1] The changes I made to this module were inspired by, and remain hugely indebted to, the teaching methods developed by friend and colleague, Genevieve Renard Painter, in the context of the Seminar in Women's Studies: Gender Justice in Canadian Law and Policy she convenes at Concordia University, Montreal. I am extremely grateful to her for sharing them with me and for all kinds of stimulating conversations. But these changes also drew inspiration from the teaching of many other friends and colleagues, including (to name only a few) the artists Charles Wiliams, Alicja Rogalska and David Parfitt and, in the field of law, Nathaniel Berman (Colombia), Luis Eslava (La Trobe), Lucy Finchett-Maddock (Goldsmiths), Suhraiya Jivraj (Kent), Jeffery Hewitt (Windsor), Maria Frederica Moscati (Sussex), Vasuki Neisah (NYU-Gallatin), Scott Newton (SOAS), Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne), James Parker (Melbourne), Charlie Peevers (Glasgow), Amanda Perry-Kessaris (Kent) and all the faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP).
Comments