Save Creative Writing in TAFE

#26: David Trembath - Some facts 

Just to address a couple of David Trembath's points. His statement that he 'wrote the course' is only true in a very limited context. The process was more about putting together an anthology of units from existing Commonwealth Training Packages. Some 90% of the units in the new Diploma have been cherry-picked and, as one Teaching Centre Manager so aptly put it, 'cobbled together' from areas such as Business Services, Music, Visual Arts, Public Sector, Information and Communications, Screen and Media. But never Writing.

So when David states, 'We worked on this course document for a year and finally ran out of time and money', you'd have to wonder what the money was spent on. We have it from writing co ordinators on the Steering Committee that when they complained about the lack of specialised\elective writing units they were told to 'go away and write them yourselves'; that there was no money for the writing of these units. Given a ridiculously short turnaround time, one co ordinator did so -- unpaid and in her own time.

And if, as he states, new units are relatively easy to write, then why didn't he do it? He was, after all the course writer. His simplictic notion that they can easily be added later is, to all of us who know the mechanics of this, way way off the mark. They needed to be written; should have been written as advised by the Steering Committee while the course was being developed.

And given the accreditation doesn't expire on the existing course until June 2011, with most TAFEs not effecting it until 2012, why was time an issue? Surely the crucial thing was to come up with a course that worked; for every stakeholder. One that met the expectations of the writing & editing industries and prospective students, and just as importantly one that TAFE providers, through their writing & editing departments, can viably structure into class groups and subjects (dirty word I know, but that's what prospective students come to us to enrol in). David is correct, when at the previous to last re accreditation the course went from its (beautiful to manage) curriculum-based form to a training package, the notion that we were providing and teaching 'subjects' was displaced by terms such as 'skills' and 'elements of competency' etc. Creative methods were employed that saw the competencies and their elements judiciously placed into the existing subjects/modules. And everything went on exactly as it had for the previous twenty years. 

But this newly written course, especially with its lack of elective specialisations and overly presciptive core units, makes it a logistical nightmare. And Cemil Bilici's example (see Discussion Thread earlier) of trying to run a Manage Project class with students doing a plethora of genres, is salient. There could be no productive workshopping in such a class. And managing a novel project requires different knowledge (read: teaching and resources) than managing a desktop publishing project; than managing an editing anthology project, and so on.
As Cemil says, if you are managing your novel, you don't want to sit through what would be for you, meaningless tutorials on how to manage a public relations writing project.

And when David says, 'A quick addition of hours gives me at least 210 hours of teacher time using general writing units which can be dedicated to novel writing without even using my creative skills to apply other units to the problem...' he forgets to mention that these 'hours' (from general writing units) cannot be used again. So if novel were all you wanted to study, fine, but what if you also want to study short story, journalism and poetry? Where will you get those hours?

He then tells us with wonderful understatement: 'Of course, it's not that simple...' And he is right.

Gary Smith