Western Sydney University has advertised for a Professor of Experiential Learning in its School of Law, a full-time, ongoing appointment at professorial level (Academic Level E), based at the Parramatta South campus with hybrid working arrangements. Applications close at 11:59pm on Wednesday 18 November 2026. The salary is A$233,831 to A$242,023 a year, plus 17 per cent superannuation and leave loading, and the university will sponsor a visa where required.
The title is more precise than most professorial advertisements allow themselves to be. It is not a general chair in law, nor even a chair in clinical legal education narrowly defined. The person appointed will carry what the university calls "strategic governance and academic leadership" for experiential learning across the undergraduate and postgraduate law programs, working closely with the Dean of Law, Professor Catherine Renshaw.
The phrase "experiential learning" has the unfortunate quality of sounding like something nobody could object to and few could define precisely. The advertisement resolves the ambiguity with a list: clinical legal education, work-integrated learning, internships, simulations, reflective practice, authentic assessment and community-engaged projects. Anyone who has run a law clinic will recognise that list as a job description in itself, before the actual job description begins.
What the advertisement asks for
The successful candidate will design, integrate and continuously develop what the advertisement calls a "distinctive experiential learning framework" across the School of Law's programs. The obligations read as follows:
- establish a coherent strategic and governance framework for experiential learning across the law programs;
- embed academically rigorous, inclusive and ethically grounded experiential learning throughout the curriculum;
- implement quality assurance, evaluation and impact measures for experiential learning initiatives;
- build capability in colleagues through mentoring, professional development, peer review and collaborative leadership;
- strengthen partnerships with the legal profession, courts, government, community legal organisations and industry.
The selection criteria ask for a PhD in law or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience, alongside demonstrated strategic academic leadership in experiential learning, clinical legal education, work-integrated learning, authentic assessment or practice-connected professional education. There is a teaching record to evidence and a network of professional relationships to demonstrate. The "or equivalent professional experience" is worth pausing on. A Level E chair that declines to insist on a doctorate is signalling that it wants someone who has actually run placements, clinics or professional programs, not merely studied them.
The practical details are unusually civilised. Staff benefits include the Employee Assistance Program, Fitness Passport eligibility, discounted private health cover, and onsite childcare at the Campbelltown, Hawkesbury, Parramatta and Penrith campuses. Enquiries go to Professor Renshaw at c.renshaw@westernsydney.edu.au, quoting reference REF1351Q.
What experiential learning means inside a law degree
Experiential learning is learning by doing, with structured reflection on the doing. In legal education the most demanding form is clinical legal education (CLE): students work on real client matters under the supervision of practising lawyers, usually in a community legal setting, and are assessed on their professional conduct, written work and reflective journals rather than an exam. The distinction from conventional doctrinal teaching matters because it changes a law school's cost structure. A lecture scales; a clinic doesn't. Every additional student in a clinic needs a supervising solicitor, a suitable file and insurance.
Western Sydney University already runs one of the more substantial operations of this kind in New South Wales. The Western Sydney University Justice Clinic, operated in partnership with Western Sydney Community Legal Centre, describes itself as the School of Law's "hub for experiential legal education." It delivers clinical placement and internship subjects, runs the university's Student Legal Service (funded through the Student Services and Amenities Fee), and does law reform and community legal education work. A November 2023 profile in Pro Bono Voco recorded that more than 140 students across 18 cohorts had completed Justice Clinic placements since the clinic began, with a further 150-plus through its external internship program.
The clinic's casework has been deliberately narrowed to areas of acute unmet need: domestic and family violence, sexual violence, modern slavery and trafficking, asylum seeker claims and broader access-to-justice matters, with referral pathways formalised through memoranda of understanding with community organisations. That is a revealing design choice. It means the law school's flagship teaching space is also a front-line legal service for some of the region's most vulnerable clients, which is precisely what makes it educationally potent and administratively expensive at the same time.
Why this hire, at this university, at this moment
The context is the student body. Figures reported in the UNSW Law Society's Court of Conscience journal put roughly 45 per cent of Western Sydney University law students in low-socioeconomic-status categories, 35 per cent from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, 39 per cent first in family to attend university, 53 per cent entering by a route other than straight from high school, and 10 per cent without formal high school qualifications. The Western Sydney region is among the most diverse in Australia, and the law school has made that diversity central to its mission.
This is where experiential learning stops being a fashionable curriculum term and becomes an equity instrument. Students without family networks in the profession cannot readily conjure a clerkship or a summer placement. A supervised clinic placement, taken for academic credit, is often their first and only exposure to actual practice before graduation. The Justice Clinic's own leadership has made this argument explicitly: the school's clinics and internships exist partly to replace the informal channels that used to do this work.
The Dean's background fits the brief. Catherine Renshaw trained at UNSW, practised as a commercial litigator at Allens, then worked at Legal Aid NSW running discrimination cases before moving into human rights scholarship. The university notes that law at Western Sydney was rated "High" for both impact and engagement in the Australian Research Council's Engagement and Impact assessment. The school is also piloting AI-generated course content, with AI avatars acting as simulated legal clients, drawing on the experience of the university's medicine and nursing schools, a scalability experiment that matters for a clinic that cannot expand its supervising solicitors indefinitely.
The regulatory pressure behind the title
There is a policy reason a law school would elevate experiential learning to a professorship rather than a program officer. In Australia, a law degree does not by itself admit anyone to practice. Graduates must also complete Practical Legal Training (PLT), structured coursework plus workplace experience governed by standards that the Law Admissions Consultative Committee (LACC) recommends to state and territory admitting authorities. The academic degree, meanwhile, is anchored by the "Priestley 11," the prescribed areas of knowledge every Australian law degree must cover. That division of labour, universities teaching doctrine while PLT providers teach practice, is now openly contested.
The New South Wales Legal Profession Admission Board's interim report on PLT reform recommends that the foundational law degree carry more practical training so graduates are genuinely "practice ready." The Law Society of South Australia's consultation submission puts the profession's frustration bluntly: PLT is "lengthy and costly, yet does not consistently deliver the practical skills graduates need for practice." Employers, regulators and students are asking the same question from different directions, and law schools are answering by building clinics, placements and simulations into the degree itself.
There is a generational marker too. 2025 marked fifty years since Australia's first clinical legal education program began, with Monash University law students working at the Springvale Legal Service, as an Alternative Law Journal retrospective records. The Kingsford Legal Centre's 2025 clinical guide lists programs at twenty-five of Australia's thirty-eight law schools. What was once a marginal, activist-flavoured experiment is now the standard by which law schools compete for students and employers judge graduates.
One title, several different kinds of learning
The advertisement bundles several distinct pedagogies under a single remit. They share a label but not a cost structure, a supervision model or a risk profile. The professor's first governance task is to know the difference.
| Form | What it looks like | What it demands |
|---|
| Clinical legal education | Students work on real client files under a supervising solicitor; the Justice Clinic runs twelve-day placements. | Practising solicitors, insurance, file management and client welfare, the most expensive model per student. |
| Work-integrated learning and internships | Placements with firms, courts, government and community organisations, often for academic credit or PLT credit where eligible. | Vetting of host organisations, supervision agreements and due diligence; scale depends on external partners. |
| Simulations and authentic assessment | Moots, client interviews, drafting tasks and AI-simulated clients. | Design and standardisation; cheapest per student, most scalable, least like real practice. |
| Reflective practice and community-engaged projects | Journals, debriefs, law reform submissions and community legal education. | Staff time for feedback; the glue that turns activity into learning. |
The appointment exists to hold these four to a common standard of quality, evaluation, impact and cost. The word "governance" is doing more work in that sentence than it appears to.
Applying: what the advertisement says, and what it doesn't
Only applications lodged through the university's online recruitment system will be considered, and candidates answer screening questions tied to the key qualifications, experience and skills. The closing time is 11:59pm on Wednesday 18 November 2026. Employer visa sponsorship is available, and reasonable adjustments can be arranged through the talent acquisition team. The full advertisement, including the position description and the "what success looks like" measures, sits on the Academic Jobs listing, and applications go through Western Sydney University's SmartRecruiters portal.
This is not the school's first recruitment in this direction. Earlier in 2026 it advertised a broader Professor, School of Law chair with an explicit brief to expand and embed experiential learning as a core component of the program. The current advertisement narrows that mandate into a dedicated professorship. Whatever the internal history, the direction of travel is consistent, and candidates should read the two advertisements together if they want to understand where the school is heading.
The question the advertisement leaves open
The Court of Conscience piece on the Justice Clinic is candid about the constraints experiential learning faces in practice: scale, sustainability, supervision capacity and equitable student access. Clinical staff simultaneously deliver legal services to vulnerable clients, supervise students and remain expected to be engaged scholars, a combination that generates significant "emotional labour" on top of unpredictable casework. There is also the matter of placement poverty. Unpaid placements impose costs that fall hardest on the students who can least absorb them, and a law school where nearly half the cohort is from a low-socioeconomic background cannot treat that as someone else's problem.
The advertisement asks one professor to make all of this rigorous and scalable without sacrificing access. It doesn't say how many placement places currently exist, how the clinics are funded beyond the Student Services and Amenities Fee and partnership work, or what happens when student demand outstrips the supply of supervising solicitors. The successful candidate will spend their first year on a question the advertisement never quite poses: how does a single professorship make experiential learning genuinely available to every law student who needs it, when clinics are expensive, placements are finite, and the supervising solicitors who make both possible are themselves in short supply?
