Kent Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris is a finalist for Law Teacher of the Year 2017.
Professor Perry-Kessaris is one of six teachers across the UK who is shortlisted in the prestigious national competition sponsored by Oxford University Press. She now moves on to the second round of judging, which involves a campus visit, observed teaching session, and interviews with students and colleagues.
With qualifications in economics and visual communication as well as in law, Professor Perry-Kessaris takes an innovative and cross-disciplinary approach to her teaching and research. She focuses primarily on the application of design strategies (such as user interaction and prototyping) and design outcomes (such as images, sound and typography) to understand and communicate about processes of econo-legal change. Her current research project, funded by a grant from the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), investigates the use of graphic design in the negotiations over the possible reunification of Cyprus. In 2014 she held an online show, ‘What can graphic design reveal about law?’ and she has been running Legal Treasure Tours since 2012.
In her endorsement of Professor Perry-Kessaris’s nomination, Head of Kent Law School Professor Toni Williams praised her capacity to engage, inspire and motivate students which she said had “become legendary” at Kent since she joined the Law School in 2013.
She described her development of legal pedagogy through images and objects as “truly innovative” and said her teaching practice was notable for its breadth: ‘She teaches across the spectrum of students, and shows similar levels of enthusiasm, skill and innovation with each cohort. She has an exceptionally strong reputation for supporting students and encouraging them to embrace developmental challenges in their personal and professional lives.
‘Amanda is a creative and imaginative scholar whose pathbreaking research on visualizing and visualized law informs all aspects of student learning in her classes, seminars and supervisions. Importantly there are clear indications that Amanda’s research and practice are influencing colleagues who have started to adopt some of her visualizing/visualized law techniques in their own classrooms.’
Professor Perry-Kessaris said: ‘I see teaching as an opportunity to refresh, sustain and apply my own learning. I learn through formal empirical and theoretical research as well as casual daily inquiry. In so doing I use all my senses and experiences, and I find it productive and fun to take this approach when teaching. I also continue to be a part time student myself — previously of economics, ethnography, drawing and now of graphic design. This allows me to remember the pleasures and agonies of following a learning path identified by another, feeling stupid and ignorant, treasuring feedback, mastering a new skill, and being bored to tears. It also allows me to learn new teaching ideas from my co-students; from how to conduct a visual analysis of a text or read an object, to how to use your immediate environment as a learning resource. And when I am the teacher, I find that the more I am able to offer structured freedom to students, the more we all learn.’
Major recent publications include ‘The Case for a Visualized Economic Sociology of Legal Development’ which won the SLSA Article Prize in 2015. Other work includes Socio-legal Approaches to International Economic Law: Text, context, subtext (Routledge 2012) and Towards an Economic Sociology of Law (Wiley-Blackwell 2013), co-edited with with Diamond Ashiagbor and Prabha Kotiswaran.
Professor Perry-Kessaris blogs about her work at econosociolegal.wordpress.com. She also tweets @aperrykessaris and publishes videos on Vimeo.
The Law Teacher of the Year award, which recognises the vital role that teachers play in the education of tomorrow’s lawyers, was previously won by Kent Law School Senior Lecturer Dr Karen Devine in 2012. This year’s winner will be announced at the Celebrating Excellence in Law Teaching conference to be held in Warwick on Thursday 29 June.