Martine Stagelund Hvidt - Didactive Tools: Using Props to Support Legal Learning in Higher Education

TLHE project 2025: Martine Stagelund Hvidt, Faculty of law 
ABSTRACT
This fall (2025), I developed and implemented Didactive Tools: Using Props to Support Legal Learning in Higher Education while teaching the 15 ECTS elective Social Rights Law – Children and Adolescents (48 students, taught in Danish). Departing from the strong textual tradition of legal education (McLachlan & Webley 2021; King 2016) and the widespread use of PowerPoint, I drew on critiques such as Isseks (2011), who argues that slide-based teaching limits creativity and critical thinking, and on findings showing no significant learning advantage from PowerPoint (Baker et al. 2018). Inspired by Biggs’ (2003) emphasis on deep learning, I taught without slides, using physical props and visual tools to illustrate complex legal problems.

Examples included a Skwish rattle to explain children's resilience, a cardboard-box exercise to illustrate poverty, outdoor handicapped accessibility observations, group mapping activities, and selected video clips. Student evaluations were positive: on a scale from 1-5 (5 being very good), the respondents rated the no-PowerPoint approach at 3.5 and the use of props at 4.08. Overall, I found this approach to support more dynamic interaction, strengthen teacher–student connections, and enhance engagement and understanding, in line with research on active learning (Sutherland 2021).