Students' ideas about their future work: using research approaches for curriculum development in legal studies

Research in higher education has clearly demonstrated that students direct their learning towards aspects of their discipline that they consider to be relevant or interesting. For students who are intending to enter specific professions, their ideas about that profession determine what that relevance may be. In the bustle of covering course content, constructing learning and assessment tasks teachers often neglect to explore variation in the ways that students expect that their studies may contribute to their futures. This paper reports on the outcomes of a research project which focused on exploring the relationships between students’ understanding of learning in law and their anticipations about working as a legal professional. The research outcomes demonstrated that students with limiting ideas about professional work also focused on atomistic and technical components of their course, whilst students who had a broad idea about work were able to learn within a range of paradigms. This finding has clear implications for the development of curriculum that supports the expansion within an institutional learning framework of students’ ideas about their future profession.