I'm reluctant to intrude but as the person who wrote the course I am troubled that there seems to be a lot of mistruth being disseminated and alarming some very well-meaning people. I'm also very troubled that nobody seems to have read the course. People seem to be taking the charges at face value without too much enquiry. I can only address a few of the charges in this space but here goes.

Re-accreditation process - it took a year. Not hasty.

Eliminate creative genres. Not true. If you examine the old course ( still posted on the Training Support Network site under Curriculum. Download the Executive Summary and see what you are defending) you will see that it didn't have explicit poetry units either. In TAFE courses teachers are asked to contextualise which means using material and topics suitable for their student's ambitions. We write things very generally to allow teachers free rein. Teachers can focus on whatever they care to nominate - Poetry. Novels, Short Stories whatever - under the general writing units. I just had another look at what we said could be covered under one unit - 120 hours of Refine Writing Skills. We said that writing could include but wasn't limited to (in alpahebetical order) :

Adaptations

Comedy writing

Commissioned pieces

Corporate writing

Education texts

Freelance work

Histories

Journalism

Non- fiction

Novels

Playwriting

Poetry

Press releases

Public relation pieces

Scientific/technical writing

Screenwriting

Short stories

Writing for digital media

Writing for the web

We also said that techniques might include but not be limited to :

First person narration, third person naration, historic, academic, stream of consiousness, post-modern , creative, poetic, descriptive, pastoral, heroic, rhetorical, declamaotory and so on.

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. That's teacher time by the way - not the amount of time you would spend writing your novel . That's 210 hours at a minimum in which you could talk about your novel with your teacher. At 5 hours a week of feedback you could do this for 42 weeks which should be enough to complete A Suitable Boy.  Of course, it's not that simple but let's get it firmly locked in that hours are about teachers in the classroom time not student writing time.

In the rest of the course you could  be learning about working as  a freelance writer. or desktop publishing or writing for the web which we put in to help broaden your skills. What about learning how to access funding for your project or how to edit so you can work at a publisher's ? All part of the new course.

Go through the new course document which doesn't seem to have been made available by our petitioners. It is around and it can be compared to the old course which might calm things a bit. Always handy to know what you are attacking rather than go on somebody's word for it.  I'll talk to people and see about getting the two courses posted side by side in an easily accessible place.

Moreover, teachers can add new units as electives whenever they like providing they have support from the writing, publishing and editing industry. The Steering Committee was fully informed about this and the teacher network has been shown how to do it. Very easy to write. We publish guides on how to do it.

Limited course duration. The new Diploma is 100 hours longer than the old Diploma.

The Certificate IV is no longer a pre-requisite. Quite true. It never really was.  Making things a pre-requisite locks people into enrolments and forces able people to do a year of unnnecessary study. There is still nothing to stop somebody doing both the Certificate IV and the Diploma if they want. Absolutely nothing. By the way not everybody who did the old Diploma did the Certificate IV. Many came in at Diploma level. We made the entry criteria much broader  to assist access and equity so people weren't forced to do two years where they only wanted one.

Electives are exactly what is said - you choose to do them. We expanded the range to include such things as writing song lyrics, writing for electronic media, writing scripts, writing persuasive copy, writing for children. There's a lot more. We added an editing unit where previously none had existed giving us some pause for thought when we wondered what had happened before in a course called writing and editing. What we did do was open the course up to people who didn't necessarily want to write a novel without taking away from the people who did. Basically we wanted to help people try to make a living at writing.

There are problems for the course teachers but they are outside the curriculum. They have problems with the government's new funding scheme which will force people who have higher qualifications pay for doing lower qualifications. Lots of people who come into professional writing come in after a degree. Now it may wind up costing them quite a lot. In other courses this resulted in massive drops in enrolment.  I think it's a very misguided system but it's not got anything to do with the course document we wrote.

I'll get out of your way now but I think before anybody starts signing petitions or making accusations it would be a very good idea to have very long hard look at the actual document under discussion.

#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

#26: David Trembath - Some facts 

Dear Mr Trembath,

I should like to draw your attention to a couple of things you wrote in in your post:

"We added an editing unit where previously none had existed giving us some pause for thought when we wondered what had happened before in a course called writing and editing."

Okay, Mr Trembath, if "previously none (editing units) existed", then how the devil did I earn an HD in Editing 2?

Or have my RPL for Editing 1 approved?

Then, you begin your post with: "... but as the person who wrote the course ..."

"Wrote the course"? What exactly did YOU write?

Is it not the case that the new course consists of a group of Units of Competency written by other sources?

Are you claiming to own copyrigh overt those Units of Competency?

If you wrote this, is that not what you are saying?

If that is not what you meant, then what exactly do you mean?