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Abstract

One of the goals of clinicians as teachers is to train law students to listen to, hear and retell their clients' stories. This task is complicated by the fact that the students - who are for the most part white and middle-class, and by definition college-educated - inhabit a world vastly different from - indeed some might say diametrically opposed to - the world inhabited by the clinic's client population, which generally tends to be poor people with a limited education, and for the most part people of color. Given these differences, students' ability to hear and believe their clients' stories is often inhibited because those stories take place in and present a reality that not only diverges from, but also contradicts the students' own reality. The clinician's first challenge, therefore, is to train the students to be on the lookout for this dissonance, and, rather than reject the differences, to integrate them into their own understanding of what is true. This essay explores the process of teaching students - and ourselves - to listen to and accept different versions of reality. Such exploration results in a proposition that is easy to state but difficult to accomplish: that in order to achieve this goal, we must challenge the students' "common sense" - their sense that they "know" how people act - by offering examples of behaviors that differ from that knowledge, without triggering the very "common sense" we are trying to combat.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

4

Issue

1

First Page

109

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