In this post, Nia Obed-Arthur, an undergraduate student at the Law School, offers an overview of their experiences creating and fulfilling a Student-Led, Individually-Created Course (SLICC). Nia considers how the SLICC’s unique reflective learning and assessment framework has been fundamental to their academic development — and their growth as a writer and scholar. This post is part of the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Series: Reflective Learning.
Editorial context
This contribution from Nia Obed-Arthur, a 3rd year Law student, importantly offers a student voice to the series on reflective learning. Nia undertook a Student-Led, Individually-Created Course (SLICC) in their first year. She valued the autonomy the SLICC framework offered and came back again, motivated to undertake a self-led project on the challenging topic of police jurisdictions surrounding women in preparation for their final-year dissertation. Nia talks here about how she has scaffolded her reflective practice from her original experiences, how she has used it elsewhere in her learning journey, and how it will continue to be important in her continued professional practice.
Nia’s reflections on reflecting
Researching, realising, and writing are the best verbs to summarise the holistic and academic experience that I readily dip myself in and out of as a student at The University of Edinburgh. Although these skills contributed to leading me here, they had not been stress-tested more than during the Summer of 2020, during which I undertook my first SLICC: an 8,000-word mini-dissertation on the impact of Feminist jurisprudence on Modern British Law, with a focus on English and Scots law respectively.
From the beginning of the SLICC experience, formulating my proposal, and writing my application, I was challenged with the question of what truly interested me, and more pressingly: who I aimed to be as an academic. In no other aspect of academia has my identity and interest been queried as rigorously as then due to the general nature of the Law (LLB with Honours) degree until the penultimate and final years. Due to the self-led character of the SLICC, reconciliation with myself and my aspirations was equal parts inescapable and enthralling. Moreover, the reflective blog process only deepened what I gained from the novel experience. Insights as to what I liked about studying, what I didn’t like, what I needed more of, what I could go without, and how best I functioned (the latter question I’m not sure we ever finish answering) were not just commonplace but mandatory to my completion of the SLICC. In this way, the reward I derived from my first SLICC did not fall short at just an A3 grade and a sense of summertime achievement, but rather has seen longevity beyond the course. I’m not sure that I’ll ever really stop learning from it.
The excitement that I derived from flourishing under my first SLICC led me to apply to do a second in the Summer of 2022, this time premised upon attempting to apply the results of my reflections under my first SLICC to a different outcome piece. Aided by the Reflection Toolkit, and the suggested use of Driscoll’s reflective model (‘What? So what? Now what?’), I took to testing who the SLICC had taught me I was. In light of it, I reduced the scope of my second SLICC, and attempted to alter my writing style. I created a looser skeleton plan, allowing room for flexibility in a way that is not encouraged within my curriculum, and explored new activities and ideas that I would never have conceived of prior to writing my first SLICC those two years beforehand, achieving an A2.
Now in my fourth year, the reflective process emblematic of the SLICC course continues to present itself in my personal and academic life, ranging in scale between micro-reflections and broader, more deliberate processes of introspection, proving the extra-and-co-curricular complement of the SLICC programme. I don’t foresee that the usefulness of reflection as a critical skill will diminish once I graduate. I hope that it’ll make me an asset in any institutional environment, encouraging me to innovate internally and externally as I imagine that the University expects of its alumni. Nevertheless, I will always recall where I truly learnt its value.
Nia Obed-Arthur
Nia is a 21-year-old fourth-year undergraduate Law student with a keen interest in jurisprudence, philosophy, and political theory, and how the three coalesce to produce and inform law and legal decisions. As the director of the BlackED Black Feminist Space and a previous Editorial Director for the Ruth Adler Magazine, Nia spends a lot of her time researching and studying the effects of those such laws on marginalised people. They intend to pursue an academic career professionally researching the philosophical premises underpinning certain laws, and their material effects. She wholeheartedly believes that the work that they have produced across both of their SLICCs have laid the foundation for these professional endeavours.
