USING MULTIPLE INITIATIVES TO GET THE STUDENTS IMPLICATED. THE CASE OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURAL LAW SUBJECT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY

In this paper the different initiatives carried out with the students of criminal procedural law subject at the University of the Basque Country will be shown.

One of the main problems the Professors have to deal with in the undergraduate education is the lack of motivation of the students, as they are seen as a passive element of the learning process. In order to change this dynamic, measures to get them implicated in the subjects must be implemented.

Considering the previous point, some innovative measures have been implemented in the teaching of Criminal Procedural Law at the University of the Basque Country (Bilbao-Biscay, Spain). These innovations, which have been warmly welcomed by the students, can be summed up as follows:

a) Watching real criminal trials recorded at the Provincial Court of Biscay. Before the visualization of the trial, the students had to work with the procedural documents of each case; and after that they had to pass the judgment of the process as if they were the real judges. Finally, the real judgment given by the Court was provided in order to let the students know about the differences between the one written by them and the real one. This experience was repeated with three different cases.
b) A visit to the Provincial Court of Biscay in order to attend real criminal trials at first hand.
c) Organizing a Criminal procedural Law seminar based on the reading of a crime novel. To take part in the seminar the students had to write two procedural documents about some crimes described in the novel.