Public Legal Education principles and practices have evolved as PLE providers have learned what works and what doesn’t. At this point, successful PLE practice tends to be grounded in the following principles:
Principle #1: Public Legal Education is user-centred
Successful Public Legal Education tends to be driven by users’ needs, their learning styles and preferences, and their preferred form of communication.
Practices which flow from this include
- conducting needs assessments,
- empathy mapping,
- plain language writing,
- visual design,
- user-testing, and
- evaluation.
Reflections on Public Legal Education principles and practices
It is currently trendy to speak of a user-centred or public-centred justice system. However, little work has been done to actually look at the system from the perspective of people experiencing legal problems. Most of what exists addresses very specific problems encountered in accessing the system, like the cost of legal services. However, the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta is currently undertaking activities to explore and expose the journey through the legal systems that survivors of domestic violence have made in efforts to resolve many of the legal issues they have had to fact in leaving abusive relationships. For more information on this project, contact CPLEA Executive Director, Jeff Surtees at JeffSurtees@cplea.ca.
- – LG Jan 2018