Postdoctoral Fellow (2026-2028)
Faculty of Law, Common Law Section
University of Ottawa
Dr. Michele Leering is undertaking a two-year postdoctoral project “Advancing reflective professionalism to prepare legal professionals for people-centred justice: New directions for research”, effective May 2026. The Common Law Section is the primary host for Michele’s research, working under the supervision of Professor David Wiseman.
Michèle’s cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary doctoral research focused on enhancing legal education across the professional learning continuum by exploring how to introduce integrative reflective practice as a core professional metacompetency. Her dissertation, “Integrative Reflective Practice in Canada and Australia: Enhancing Legal Education, Pedagogy, and Professionalism,” was Queen’s Law Outstanding Thesis in 2023.
Michèle‘s post-doctoral project expands on her prior work in three phases.
In the first phase, Michèle seeks to advance reflective practice by co-organizing and now evaluating the first-ever International Symposium Series: Reflective Practice of Legal Professionals co-hosted with Queen’s University Faculty of Law and her former PhD co-supervisor, Professor Sharry Aiken. This Series featured approximately 150 speakers at five events between April and July 2026.
The second phase will employ applied, action and case study research to enhance reflective practice pedagogy at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law with interested faculty, and by supporting a community of practice. Two case studies exploring how civil law educators advance reflective practice with their students are proposed, including with a civil law educator at a law school in Quebec.
The third phase, which will be undertaken contemporaneously with the other two phases, will extend her research into the field of competency development for legal professionals. This is an area of evolving interest for Canadian law schools and legal regulators. This phase includes creating and mobilizing new knowledge by helping to organizefor the first-ever Canadian Championing Health Justice Partnerships conference in September 2026 in Toronto, funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario, including convening a session with Prof. Vanessa Gruben on academic health & justice partnerships.
Prior to becoming a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, since September 2024, Michèle has been a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Faculty of Law. She was also recently appointed for a three-year term as a Queen’s Institute of Educational Scholarship and Research (QIESR) Scholar. Prior to and contemporaneously with her graduate studies, she served for almost four decades (until March 2024) as a lawyer and the Executive Director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre (CALC), a non-profit community legal clinic in Belleville, Ontario. Her work there included roles as a practitioner-researcher and community organizer, in addition to conventional lawyering. She led several local participatory action research projects on issues of hunger, poverty, homelessness, and access to justice, and undertook empirical research studies. Michèle was a founding member of numerous communities of practice for Ontario’s community legal clinics’ staff – including, as examples, for clinic executive directors, community developers, those serving rural and remote communities, exploring evaluation and outcome measurement, and, since 2016, advancing health justice partnerships.
Michèle was a Law Foundation of Ontario Community Leadership in Justice Fellow (2009) at Osgoode Hall Law School (York University), a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University (2014, 2017) and Bond University (2017). She has been a member of the International Legal Aid Group and has also worked with the Open Society Justice Initiative, Ukraine’s International Renaissance Foundation, and Namati to provide training on legal empowerment, community lawyering, community legal clinics, and paralegals in international forums. She has been invited to share her research with the OECD, UN Office of Drugs and Crime, Justice Data Observatory, National Action Committee, and in other fora. As a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s Access to Justice Committee, she chaired its Legal Education Working Group and helped to produce an experiential learning guide for Canadian law students. In 2022, she was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada for her work on access to justice.
Michèle holds Bachelor of Arts and law degrees from Western University, a Master of Adult Education from St. Francis Xavier University, and a PhD from Queen’s University. During her PhD studies, Michele received numerous scholarships and was awarded the inaugural Queen’s Law Graduate Student Programs Prize in 2023.
Email: [email protected]
