Save Creative Writing in TAFE

As soon as I can I'll get the course documents up for you. Have you seen them yet or are you proceeding on what you are being told ? When you see the documents you'll find that there isn't a unit called Novel Writing in the existing course. You may be familiar with a subject called Novel Writing which was created by a College out of a Unit or Units. The answer to you both is that yes - you can have those things depending on how the TAFE Institute wants to structure things and how many people enrol and want to do that subject. The problem that isn't very clear to people is that it's not the course structure that causes difficulty. It's how the training organisation chooses to deliver it and how many students they have. Obviously if only one student wants to do a particular unit or subject the college will not be able to provide it. If 40 enrol they can provide a range of subjects under the general unit heading of Refine Writing Skills or combine units to make the hours longer. We encourage this in providers (it's called holistic delivery if you want the jargon)

The course is Professional Writing and Editing. It has to cover lots of things because there are many different types of writers. Each TAFE institute can choose what to focus on. Don't imagine that we are saying that each TAFE must provide all the electives. They have the freedom to choose to deliver only those for which they have students and teachers.

As I mentioned before we made the course 100 hours longer to help people have more time. Can I also point out again that if teachers want to create a range of electives called Poetry, Novel Writing and Lyrical Analysis they can. They could create 300 hours of units if they want to entirely devoted to Creative Writing Genres if they can get industry support for these ideas. We have given them every encouragement to do so. We worked on this course document for a year and finally ran out of time and money but it's basically always a work in progress and at this point it's over to the teachers to develop it to suit their student's needs. It would take a writer who knew what they were doing about a day to write a unit. Several weeks to ratify it with other stakeholders but it's not hard.

My advice to you is to get familiar with the old and new course documents and approach the colleges to develop units and subjects.

Margaret - courses are written in hours. The Diploma has a maximum of 740 hours - about a year. If you want two years - enrol in the Certificate IV first but its level may be too low for you. If that's not appropriate there is no shortage of Creative Writing courses including degrees. Both Deakin and RMIT run degrees in creative writing.