Profile

Biography

Dr Jenny Gibbons
BSc (Newcastle University), GDL and LPC (Manchester Metropolitan University), LLM (Aberystwyth University), PhD (Lancaster University), Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Solicitor

Deputy Head of York Law School

I joined York Law School in February 2013. In addition to my role as Deputy Head of the Law School, I am the module leader for the  Human Rights: Law, Power and Global Challenges module and the Employment Law module and deliver some of the Foundations in Law plenaries in public law. I am the Deputy Chair of the Board of Studies and represent the law school at University committees, including the University Teaching Committee and the Social Science Faculty Learning and Teaching Group.

Between 2004 and 2013 I worked at BPP Law School in Leeds where I taught on the LLB, GDL, LPC and BPTC programmes. Before commencing a teaching career I worked as a solicitor in Manchester.    

Research

Overview

• Legal education curriculum design and delivery
• Comparative legal education
• Clinical legal education
• Reflective practice
• Equality and diversity in employment practice
• Rule of law and access to justice

Publications

Selected publications

Chapters in books

• Gibbons, J., “Assessment in legal education: qualification or quantification?”, in Grimes, R. (ed.) Re-thinking Legal Education Under the Civil and Common Law, London: Routledge, 135-142, 2017.

Articles in journals

• Gibbons, J., How is reflection “framed” for legal professional identity? Using Bernstein and Leering to understand the potential for reflection in our curriculum as written, experienced and assessed The Law Teacher, 53:4, 2019, 401-415
• Gibbons, J., Reflection, realignment and refraction: Bernstein's evaluative rules and the summative assessment of reflective practice in a problem-based learning programme, Teaching in Higher Education 24:7, 2019, 834-849
• Gibbons, J., Exploring conceptual legal knowledge building in law students’ reflective reports using theoretical constructs from the sociology of education: what, how and why? The Law Teacher  52:1, 2018, 38-52
• Gibbons, J., Whose Access to whose justice? The contextualisation of administrative law on undergraduate programmes. Nottingham Law Journal 27:2, 2018, 48-61
• Gibbons, J., Policy recontextualization: The proposed introduction of a multiple-choice test for the entry-level assessment of the legal knowledge of prospective solicitors in England and Wales, and the potential effect on university-level legal education International Journal of the Legal Profession 2017 24(3) 227-241
• Gibbons, J. Oh the irony!: A reflective report on the assessment of reflective reports on an LLB programme. The Law Teacher, 49:2, 2015, 176-188

Co-authored articles

• Meers, J., Gibbons, J and Laws, W., Research Magpies: student sourcing behaviours on an undergraduate law degree. Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Perspectives, online 2020 
• Grimes, R., and Gibbons, J., Assessing experiential learning – us, them and the others. International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, 23, 2016, 111

Practice-based research

• Gibbons J. “The assessment of the process of learning: reflection or refraction? York Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Journal, vol 2, February 2018, 15-26
• Gibbons, J. “Supervising independent work at the York Law School Clinic. University of York FORUM, Issue 35, Summer 2014, 8-9

External activities

Memberships

• Society of Legal Scholars
• Socio-Legal Studies Association
• Association of Law Teachers
• Society for Research into Higher Education

Fellowships

• Higher Education Academy Senior Fellow

Visiting Lectureships 

• Charles University, Prague

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Human Rights: Law, Power and Global Challenges (Module Leader)
• Employment Law (Module Leader)
• Dissertation (Supervisor)
• Foundations in Law - public law plenaries
• Professionalism & Ethics