Editor’s Note: This is the first part in a two-part series about Elsa Zawedde, one of the first individuals to receive BRIDGE Global South Fellowship, and her research developing and refining a “Obuntu-Bulamu” teaching model for law schools. In this first story, Zawedde shares why cultural humility matters when developing a professional identity among lawyers.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Elsa Zawedde, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's College of Law, was one of the first individuals to receive a BRIDGE Global South Fellowship.
The fellowship aims to promote research collaboration and partnership development for early career researchers from countries within the Global South.
Zawedde, who also holds a master’s degree from the Illinois College of Law, spent her summer on campus as a visiting fellow and continued to refine her research on dynamic health justice partnerships in Uganda, her home country.
For three months she worked with and was mentored by faculty at the College of Law including Colleen Murphy, the college’s associate dean for academic affairs and the recently appointed interim associate chancellor and vice provost for global affairs and strategies.
Although the fellowship program ended in August, Zawedde is remaining on campus through December to continue her work under the guidance of Murphy.
“The mentorship, the connections, the webinars, and the productivity I’ve had in my research and to be supported in building something for my home (country) have been my highlights for this fellowship,” Zawedde said.
During the term of the fellowship program and beyond, Zawedde is developing and refining her “Obuntu-Bulamu” teaching (OBT) model. This is a transdisciplinary approach to introducing cultural humility in legal education in Ugandan law schools.
Obuntu-Bulamu is a philosophy that embodies the concept of humanity and interconnectedness, emphasizing shared values such as generosity, compassion, consideration, and unity for collective well-being and a flourishing community.
“This teaching model takes us back to who we are as Ugandans, and starting from who we are humbles us and helps us adopt cultural humility something that I’m trying to implement into law schools,” Zawedde said.
Where did you see a need for cultural humility in law schools?
As she went through law school herself, Zawedde said she realized there was a professional identity crisis among students.
She explained that law schools, particularly in Uganda, only look at developing how their students present themselves externally.
They want to produce competent lawyers who are experts in law, so they encourage students to think and act like lawyers and pump them with knowledge and literature and case studies.
However, she said they never truly look at internal development or encourage critical self-reflection.
She noted that critical self-reflection is an internal dimension of oneself that forces you to understand who you are, what values are important to you, and how your own culture informs your day-to-day life.
“All these things contribute to how (a lawyer) interacts with clients and contribute to what kind of services (they) offer clients, and whether (they’ll) look at (their) client as the expert or whether (they’ll) be the expert,” Zawedde explained. “So, if we are trying to train law students to be client-centered, we have to resolve the question of professional identity and that can only be done if we (teach) those students to reflect on who they are so that they’re biases are not imposed on the people they are serving.”
But where does cultural humility matter when developing a professional identity? Zawedde said that being in law school is incredibly time consuming and most of the time law students don’t have the bandwidth to learn who they are and who they are becoming.
She said that’s a problem because when these students become lawyers, their goal is to just win cases, and they end up forgetting that how they win cases matters.
“A ‘win’ could be a win for you but not your client, and unless you take time to critically reflect on yourself, you do not do your clients justice,” she said. “You end up representing your own interests and not your client’s interests. Without cultivated professional identity, your interactions with your clients are prone to bias and you’re prone to go to your clients as a self-proclaimed expert instead of allowing your client to be the expert in their lived experiences.”
And that’s why cultural humility matters in developing professional identity because it forces an individual to critically reflect on who they are and who they are becoming and teaches them to accept that they are not the experts in someone’slived experience.
“A lawyer should be able to say, ‘I know the law, but I didn’t live my client’s experience.’ Their mindset should be that of learning from the person they hope to represent, and legal education is not doing that justice,” Zawedde said. “We’re not training law students to engage in critical self-reflection, to understand who they are so that they don’t force their voice on who they are serving. They need to listen to and learn from their clients.”
The second part of this series will be published on Monday, Nov. 3.
Analicia Haynes is the storytelling and social media speicalist at Illinois International. She can be reached at ahayn2@illinois.edu.