Professional Turns: The Juridical Field, Australian Practical Legal Training Practitioners, and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

There is a paucity of scholarship of teaching and learning in Australian practical legal training.

I study practical legal training practitioners' ("PLT practitioners") engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning.* I investigate this engagement through individual and extra-individual domains, exploring how structures are inscribed into practices, and questioning whether practices can affect structures in and around PLT.

This qualitative research draws on documentary sources and semi-structured interviews with thirty-six PLT practitioners from university-based and non-university-based PLT providers. Data analysis was informed by Bourdieu's "reflexive sociology" and de Certeau's "heterological science".

In this paper, I discuss intersections between PLT practitioners' engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning, and their career trajectories as lawyers and teachers, against the background of legal education's history and structures. This interdisciplinary research provides internationally relevant insights about practice research, and scholarship of teaching and learning in the professions, particularly legal education.