Points of view in the "justice dilemma": A learning scenario in law and justice studies

While scenarios have been used as teaching tools for a very long time and may in fact be one of the earliest of pedagogical techniques, there has been comparatively little educational theory developed around their use, particularly in a tertiary education setting. Books like Errington's edited collection of essays 'Developing Scenario Based Learning' (2003) have gone some way to remedy this shortfall, but we are still far from getting a clear picture of how many educators use scenarios as a formal learning tool or of the manner of deployment or of the ways in which their success is evaluated. Presented here is one simple learning scenario which was developed with the intention of exploring the notion of 'point of view' as it relates to theory, specifically theories of law and justice. The idea was to take some fairly dry and abstract theoretical models and put them into action to explore the areas of overlap and conflict. This article explores the scenario, its educational context and learning outcomes and engages in evaluation of its success as a teaching tool.