Toward Job-Ready Competence: A “One Case, Three Returns” Closed-Loop Approach to Teaching Reform in the Course Safety and Emergency Laws and Regulations

Abstract

Courses on safety-related laws and regulations commonly suffer from cases detached from front-line law-enforcement settings and from learning outcomes that never reach practice. Taking the course Safety and Emergency Laws and Regulations as its subject, this paper proposes a closed-loop teaching reform scheme entitled “One Case, Three Returns.” The scheme takes a single real legal event drawn from the front line of on-post internships as its operating unit and completes one teaching cycle through three crossings of the boundary between the classroom and practice. The first return — Case Return-flow — converts first-hand events encountered by students during their on-post internships into classroom cases through collection, screening, de-identification, and pedagogical redesign. The second return — Legal Retrospection — draws on the four-phase sequence of “prevention and emergency preparedness, monitoring and early warning, emergency response and rescue, and post-incident recovery and reconstruction” to trace, section by section within the classroom, the applicable statutory provisions, responsible parties, procedural requirements, and legal consequences. The third return — Action Response — sends the rectification proposals, public legal-education plans, or practice projects produced by students back to the front line to be tested in real settings. A cross-cohort relay mechanism is introduced so that cases brought back by one student cohort become teaching material for the next, enabling case resources to accumulate across cohorts. A four-dimensional teaching-evaluation rubric covering “regulation identification — provision citation — responsibility determination — rectification proposal” is also developed, converting competence in applying the law from impressionistic description into observable indicators.