Writing Across Six Time Zones: Part III
The Role of the Curriculum Advisory Committee
By Susanne Glenn

Writing can be a tough business. It requires a person to toil endless hours refining thoughts and perfecting expression, only to have an editor drown every page in a sea of red ink. If you're one of the very few with sufficient knowledge, skill, and prestige to write a NACLAA course, your job just got a lot tougher. Rather than one editor, you have what seems like an army of them. Officially, they're known as the Curriculum Advisory Committee.

These committees are established for each new course and they bring together experts from across Canada to review and make recommendations on all aspects of the course content. The members provide advice regarding specific topics, appropriate readings and even theoretical approaches to teaching the material.

Editing by committee is a new experience for Saskatoon lawyer and author Felix Hoehn. Felix is currently writing the manual for NACLAA's Municipal Law I and the curriculum committee for that course includes 6 lawyers from 5 different provinces. He says that it is not as bad as it sounds and admits that it would be very difficult, if not impossible for anyone to write a municipal law course for a national audience without a committee. According to Felix the committee's collaborative approach encourages vigorous debate with the goal of producing a course that will educate and challenge the students.

While committee meetings might seem like "tough love" to the uninitiated, members are actually quite supportive, and incisive criticisms are never meant personally. Ultimately, everyone wants the same thing: a dynamite course that will enable NACLAA students to live up to (or exceed) their considerable advance billing.

Next week in Writing Across Six Time Zones: The Role Of The Instructional Designer.

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