USask Law professors win national award

Robin Hansen and Jaime Lavallee, professors at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law (USask Law), received the 2025 Prize for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning from the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT).

The award honours exceptional contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by a Canadian law teacher. CALT defines SoTL as investigating questions related to teaching and learning and sharing the answers obtained through peer review, publication, performance or presentation.

Hansen and Lavallee jointly published the paper Reflections on the TRC’s Mandate to Law Schools: Microscopic and Macroscopic Changes.

In its 2015 report, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) called for law schools to integrate Indigenous knowledge and perspectives into their curriculum and practice.

In their paper, Hansen and Lavallee review the TRC’s mandate to law schools and discuss the first-year class – Kwayeskastasowin – that USask Law added in 2018 to fulfill the mandate, as well as the internal review that they completed of the class in 2023.

The paper also provides some background about their relationship; in the paper’s opening paragraphs, they describe going on a walk together in June 2020. “One an extrovert; the other an introvert. One a tenured professor, the other not. One is white; the other is Indigenous. Both are from the Prairies. . . .

“Why does this walk matter? It matters because in the years since that first walk, the colleagues shared and learned individually with one another, contributing to understandings of what it means to be a law teacher on the Prairies in the early twenty-first century. Through interactions between the colleagues, change occurred on what we understand in this article to be 'microscopic' level. . . . These colleagues continued to walk, talk, and share in the years following – making meaningful changes to, for and with each other.”