Professor and Associate Dean Natt Gantt recently moderated two sessions on legal education at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Annual Conference, held on July 23-29 in Boca Raton, Florida. The SEALS Conference is attended by law school faculty and administrators from around the country and includes a full week of sessions on diverse topics related to the law, legal education, and the legal profession.
The first session was titled “Professional Identity as a Search for Spiritual Well-Being—Helping Students Care for their Souls.” The session featured nine esteemed discussants, eight professors from a broad range of law schools and one expert from the Law School Admission Council. During the two-and-a-half-hour session, Associate Dean Gantt moderated a rich discussion that focused on:
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How to define “spiritual well-being.”
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Why the topic of law student spiritual well-being is important to discuss.
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What practices and strategies can help law students cultivate their spiritual well-being.
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What are the challenges to improving students’ spiritual well-being and what are positive ways to overcome those challenges.
Associate Dean Gantt’s former colleague from Regent University School of Law, Professor Ben Madison, developed the idea for the session and asked Professor Gantt to moderate.
Spiritual well-being is one of the six components of well-being identified by the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being in its groundbreaking 2017 report, The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change, but the topic of spiritual well-being can be difficult to discuss and is often overlooked in presentations on lawyer and law student well-being generally. Discussants and attendees, therefore, appreciated the thoughtful discussion on the topic. For instance, one attendee, Professor Erica McElreath from Charleston School of Law, wrote after the session, “I left very encouraged and with lots of ideas on how to support my students. Thanks for organizing such a great group!”
Associate Dean Gantt also moderated a session titled “Training Session on Mentoring Law Students” as part of SEALS Newer Law Professors Workshop. The session featured four distinguished panelists: Professor Tim Floyd from Mercer University School of Law, Professor Kendall Kerew from Georgia State University College of Law, Professor Jerry Organ from the University of St. Thomas School of Law; and Carwina Weng, Senior Specialist in Professional Identity Formation at the Law School Admission Council. The two-and-a-half-hour program was highly-interactive and included numerous role plays in which the attendees witnessed a good example of a professor mentoring a student and a not-so-good example. In addition, attendees were able to participate in role plays themselves based on hypothetical scenarios the panelists distributed to participants.
Law professors are called on to mentor law students now more than ever, and this session addressed tips and techniques for effective mentoring, including how to establish good relationships with students while maintaining appropriate boundaries. Attendee feedback on this session was also positive. For instance, Barbara Pfeffer Billauer, who serves as a Professor of Law at the University of Porto in Portugal, wrote to Associate Dean Gantt after the session: “I must commend you on all the effort and coordination that obviously went into [the session]—it really showed.”
“Being able to moderate both sessions on such important topics with such fabulous discussants and presenters was a tremendous honor,” says Associate Dean Gantt. “As law professors, we must approach our task holistically and consider ways we can foster our students’ well-being and moral formation. In coordinating and leading these sessions, I gained a new appreciation for the critical role legal education can play in developing our students’ professional identity.”