A. Applicant information
Angela Mae Kupenda
Associate Professor
Mississippi College School of Law
151 E. Griffith St.
Jackson, MS 39201
601-925-7144 phone
601-925-7113 fax
Home Page: http://law.mc.edu/
B. Program information
1. Summary description
Teaching Professionalism by Modeling in the Most Difficult Places
Our students learn more from how we conduct ourselves than by what we preach to them about professionalism. To me, a critical quality for a legal professional is the ability to practice tolerance and open-mindedness when placed in difficult circumstances and with people who think differently than oneself. For me, this “difficult place” has often been in my Constitutional Law courses.
Although I enjoy teaching Constitutional Law, it seemed to me that for many years a brick wall would separate me from more than half of my students. Perhaps this was partly because I am, in fact, quite liberal, black and female, while many of my students are quite conservative, white and male. This barrier seemed even more obvious as the class discussion would delve into the area of individual rights. See Angela Kupenda, On Teaching Constitutional Law when my Race is in Their Face, 21 Law and Inequality 215 (2003).
To be honest, I couldn’t consider myself an “excellent” professional, though, as long as this barrier persisted. How could I be a model for “professional” behavior when I had difficulty engaging those different from me in critical discussions on topics such as race, gender, etc.?
So, I set out to devise a means of modeling more professional behavior in the classroom. For me, a legal professional worth emulating is one who is open minded, thoughtful, approachable, while also being challenging and provocative.
I achieved my goal as I developed and implemented several programs for incorporating discussions of race, gender and diversity in the classroom in a more productive dialogue. See Angela Kupenda, Replacing Preaching with Reaching, (under consideration for publication in Teaching Tolerance, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center) and Kupenda, Risking Collaborative Learning in Core Courses, The Law Teacher, Spring 2002 at page 6. These programs included sharing responsibility for discussions of controversial topics with my students and encouraging collaborative work among students on divisive issues.
My students benefitted by learning from a (far from perfect, but) better model of how professionals can disagree while being agreeable and challenging, And, I found that my formerly “difficult place” was really a challenging classroom filled with insightful students who soon wold become my treasured peers.
2. Program history
For the past three years, I have incorporated these programs in my Constitutional Law and Race and the Law courses.
In my Constitutional Law class during the fall of 2002 at Mississippi College, I shared the responsibility for the individual rights discussions with my students. They prepared collaborative, group presentations of the various topics. As I worked with the groups one by one, we engaged each other in a deeper, but more productive and less defensive discussion of many sensitive topics. By the time the groups presented in class, the students recognized that there are many different points of view on the legal issues. We all learned, I think, to be more tolerant, respectful, and professional in disagreeing on important and emotional topics.
While teaching as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of teaching Excellence at Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, spring semester 2001, I taught Constitutional Law to a first year class of 140 students. I administered a collaborative midterm which required the students to work in small groups on a major project on a constitutional issue. Many of the groups had to address such issues as racial and gender stereotyping, etc., as they attempted to negotiate the process. I worked with them and also shared with them my own [horror] stories of trying to work with my own colleagues and encouraged them to be better than we were.
Other examples appear in Kupenda, Replacing Preaching with Reaching, (under consideration for publication in Teaching Tolerance, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center).
D. Optional
Supporting materials (sent by mail)
Angela Kupenda, On Teaching Constitutional Law when my Race is in Their Face, 21 Law and Inequality 215 (2003).
Angela Kupenda, Replacing Preaching with Reaching, (under consideration for publication in Teaching Tolerance, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center).
Angela Kupenda, Risking Collaborative Learning in Core Courses, The Law Teacher, Spring 2002 at page 6.