Bienvenidos a la carrera : Diseño de clases para el primer año en ciencias jurídicas

Welcome to the career: Lessons plan for the first year of the degree in legal science. -- SUMMARY: The purpose of this work is to analyze the issue concerning the preparation of classroom lessons for the courses of the first year of the degree in legal science, which was identified as a matter of concern while teaching Roman Law at the National University of La Plata. For that purpose, two fundamental aspects will be examined: the situation of the subject-student and the teaching approach chosen by the teacher. First, we will briefly describe the process of institutional and intellectual affiliation of first year students, specifying the different stages of this transition as well as the challenges presented by academic literacy, in order to place into context the need to devise different teaching strategies for the initial years of university study. Then, we will analyze different aspects of classroom teaching, particularly in the field of legal education, including areas such as planning, development, management of content knowledge, and the teacher-student bond, among others, in accordance with the results of research work on the teaching of law. After these considerations, we should stress the importance of taking innovative steps in the methodological approach to the lesson -which is considered as a unit of meaning- both by reflecting on the classroom perspective and by adopting criteria and practices that encourage the affiliation of first-year students. This entails examining sequential structures, learning-oriented activities, student motivation, teamwork dynamics, the role of the teacher, the use of the space, the contribution of modern technologies, and the generation of knowledge as a group, thus justifying -from a pedagogical viewpoint- the possible ways of organizing a lesson, understood as a dialogic relation. Finally, we propose a lesson plan created especially for students in the first year of the degree in law, by combining different teaching methodologies and suggesting didactic resources to be ...