The student as lecturer: building confidence, collaboration, and community in first year undergraduate law lectures

Abstract

Should first year undergraduate students be involved in the delivery of lectures? This paper reports on the development of a project to instil student leadership in large group learning (lectures). The initiative draws from an experimental student-run lecture in the spring of 2018, when the six undergraduate co-authors took the opportunity to stand in as the lecturer in a core first year module. The results of that experiment led us, in 2019, to explore formal opportunities for student leadership in first year lectures. In this model, the teacher–student relationship becomes one of collaboration: the lecturer mentors rather than presents. Our findings contribute to the literature on student-led teaching, corroborating accounts that report greater participation and collaboration as a result of student-led teaching. The novelty of our model is that it reimagines learning roles, positioning students as lecturers at the point where students first encounter material and at an early stage of undergraduate study. Dismantling traditional learning hierarchies in this way has the potential to encourage a collaborative relationship between teachers and learners, nurturing student confidence and fostering a stronger learning community. This paper is an extension of such a collaboration, being written collectively by six undergraduate students and our lecturer.