Of density and decline: reflections on environmental law teaching in the UK and on the co-production of environmental law scholarship

This chapter offers a personal reflection on an exercise undertaken in 2017-2018 with a cohort of final year, undergraduate Law students at University College London in the UK. As part of their optional Environmental Law module, all students taking the class were required to gather in data on the teaching of environmental law in UK universities and then, as a second phase, students worked in groups (some on data analysis, some on a literature review etc). All of this work was compulsory (in that students had no choice about being part of the project at this point), extra-curricular (in that this was in addition to their usual seminar preparation work), and non-assessed. After February 2018, participation in the exercise was optional. 15 out of 32 students agreed to carry on working on the project, and the resulting paper is currently under review by a UK environmental law journal. This piece speaks not to the substance of our research, but to the methodology of co-production: what it was like working with students as co-authors while also being their ‘teacher’ in the classroom. And, and perhaps most importantly, the chapter offers up what I would do differently if I were to undertake a similar project in the future.