Queen’s Visiting Scholar Michele Leering, PhD’23, has a mission to introduce integrated reflective practice into the legal profession through training. 

When Michele Leering, PhD’23, described herself as “a social justice lawyer” in a Master of Adult Education class at St. Francis Xavier University, she was gently chided by one of her fellow students. “He considered the term an oxymoron!“ the Queen’s Visiting Scholar and Member of the Order of Canada recalls ruefully. “That brought home to me how, outside my own environment, many people misinterpret the role, values and intentions of our profession.”

Decrying the damage that’s recently been done in the U.S. to the concept and power of the rule of law, Leering declares, “We’ve got to figure out a better way to communicate who we are, what we stand for, and what our role is. We need to more clearly define and advocate for people-centred justice.”

At the heart of this issue, she believes, is legal education. Her award-winning doctoral thesis, which received the inaugural Queen’s Faculty of Law Graduate Programs Prize in November 2024, proposes an innovative approach to educating legal professionals. Entitled “Integrative Reflective Practice in Canada and Australia: Enhancing Legal Education, Pedagogy, and Professionalism” it was co-supervised by Professors Sharry Aiken and Erik Knutsen, and incorporates concepts and professional knowledge acquired in Leering’s 40-year career as a social justice lawyer and executive director of Belleville’s Community Advocacy & Legal Centre.

In announcing the award, Associate Dean Josh Karton said that Leering’s examiners considered her thesis to be “transformative and extraordinary” and suggested, “It breaks new ground for how we train lawyers and other professionals.”

Acknowledging now that she never intended to pursue a PhD, Leering says her initial research into what works most effectively for professional training convinced her that law schools could benefit from introducing the type of pedagogical methods used successfully by other professions, like medicine. It was not until her Master of Adult Education studies that she discovered the professional learning concept of “reflective practice” – a term she’d never encountered in her own legal training or law practice after.

A new “road map” for curriculum design

“Canadian medical students are exposed to expectations of their profession through the CANMEDS framework, which applies across the entire learning spectrum,” Leering says. “Roles and responsibilities are articulated first, based on empirical research about what the public and society need from physicians. Only then do they introduce the competencies that align with those roles. The legal profession has never generated a competency framework that is as robust and inspirational,” she adds.

Based on her cross-disciplinary, cross-jurisdictional research, Leering developed the concept of “integrated reflective practice” for legal education, to better equip law students to become ‘justice-ready’ and ‘practice-ready’. The purpose was to help them focus on aspirational roles and responsibilities and to learn a new set of competencies – including the “adaptive expertise” to acquire and use this professional knowledge and skills appropriately.  

“The five domains of reflection I’ve discerned from my research – reflection on practice, self- reflection, critical reflection, integrative reflection and collective reflection – function as a ‘road map’ to support curriculum design and ensure future legal professionals are developing a multi-faceted capacity for deep, systematic and disciplined reflection,” Leering explains. “I believe that how a legal professional (whether law teacher, lawyer, or others) implements and sustains their reflective practice is unique to each individual and the change they’re trying to create through their work, as well as the professional role they’re playing.”

Sharing her findings around the globe

Over more than a decade of conducting her “action research” Leering has made numerous presentations about reflective practice and access to justice at law schools and conferences in Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Nepal, Spain, Hungary, Netherlands, Ukraine, U.K. and the U.S. In 2024 alone, she addressed the U.K. Association of Law Teachers as keynote speaker; the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Round Table on Access to Justice; and the United Nations’ Office of Drugs and Crime Expert General Meeting.

In 2020, the dedicated social justice lawyer was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada for her work helping vulnerable and marginalized populations gain access to legal services and the justice system. Her citation adds: “A national and international proponent of community-based justice, legal empowerment and holistic approaches, she also advocates for including reflective practice as a core professional competency for lawyers and an access to justice consciousness.”

As a Queen’s Visiting Scholar, Leering is both expanding her research and gaining valuable new perspectives. “I have the luxury of being able to hear faculty presentations on their work, and have been particularly inspired by Indigenous legal scholars here,” she says, noting that she is auditing two courses this year: one on learning Anishnaabe law from the land, by Professor Lindsay Borrows and the other a course by Professor Kimberly Murray on lawyering for reconciliation.

“What I’ve garnered from my time at Queen’s Law – first doing a PhD and now as a Visiting Scholar – is the intellectual space for research, writing and reflection, and validation of my concern that preparing 21st-century legal professionals is truly important work,” she affirms. “Queen’s has also given me a chance to create a community of like-minded people throughout the world.”

Looking to the future, Leering says she will continue her post-doctoral study, as well as speaking engagements around the globe. She is currently working with Professor Aiken to organize an international symposium on reflective practice in legal education, and with other collaborators on a provincial symposium on health-justice partnerships, both to be held in 2026.

Describing her research approach as “co-constructing and affirmative, and influenced by appreciative enquiry,” Leering says her dissertation is intended as “truly a knowledge-sharing document” that will help support legal educators who want to enhance the curriculum. She also hopes it will help to strengthen the resolve of legal professionals to make the world a better place.

“One of my concerns after working for almost 40 years in a social justice practice is how difficult it is to imbed critical insights into how we practice, and our advocacy,” she observes. “We need to step up when the values we profess to hold dear are being threatened. If lawyers aren’t going to stand up to injustice, then for heaven’s sake, who will?”

By Nancy Dorrance