Michele is a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s Faculty of Law. Graduating with a PhD from Queen’s Law in 2023, she also served for almost four decades as a lawyer and the Executive Director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre, a non-profit community legal clinic in Belleville, Ontario. As a Visiting Scholar, she is pursuing two research and writing projects. The first advances her doctoral research findings on the importance of cultivating integrative reflective practice as an essential competency for legal professionals. Her thesis documents the imperatives for enhancing legal education pedagogy. She specifically documents how reflective practice, a critical aspect of professional learning theory, benefits legal educators, law students, and legal practitioners, drawing on her empirical research and research studies, and an extensive cross-disciplinary and cross-jurisdictional literature review. Michele has been sharing her research findings by offering seminars/workshops about reflective practice at law schools and conferences in Canada, Australia, Netherlands, UK, and the US. She is laying the groundwork for a crowd-sourced book on reflective practice pedagogy in law, collaborating with law professors from four countries, and her former PhD co-supervisor, Sharry Aiken.

Her second focus is on access to justice through the lens of interdisciplinary research and examines collaborations between legal and health professionals. Her background paper on the impact of justice and health partnerships in four countries included a scoping review with Queen’s University Department of Family Medicine, published in 2023, and a 2019 mapping study of Ontario’s health justice partnerships. She has presented on this research and its implications in forums that include the OECD Roundtable on Equal Access to Justice, and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime. She is working with others from Ontario’s Health Justice Community of Practice to organize a national symposium in 2026 to advance these partnerships, as part of an initiative funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario.

She has a MAdEd from St. Francis Xavier University, and a BA and law degrees from Western University. She 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 is 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. As a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s Access to Justice Committee, she chaired its Legal Education Working Group that produced an Experiential Learning Guide “Learning Law in Place” for Canadian Law students. In 2022, she was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada for her work on access to justice.

During her PhD studies, Michele received numerous scholarships and was awarded the first ever Queen’s Law Graduate Student Programs Prize in 2023. Her dissertation “Integrative Reflective Practice in Canada and Australia: Enhancing Legal Education, Pedagogy, and Professionalism” was the 2023 Queen’s Law Outstanding Thesis.

Publications:

Refereed contributions

Other refereed contributions

Non-refereed contributions