"Democracy begins in conversation": the phenomenology of problem-based learning and legal education

Abstract

Learning is complex for any number of reasons. One of these is that it doesn’t take place in a laboratory: it happens in real places, within and between real people, and as a consequence it takes place in multi-factorial environments. At every stage of learning in Higher Education (HE), from student choice of institution and programme, to the transfer of learning from theory to practice, to a single institution’s or a teacher’s evaluation of teaching and learning, there are many causal factors that affect educational process and outcome. The complexities and variables created by the interaction of such multiple factors, well known in the field of education, make learning a highly complex phenomenon to analyse and understand.