Does PLEI need more formal professional development opportunities? Aside from workshops and seminars offered each year at the Public Legal Education Association of Canada’s annual conference, PLE practitioners in Canada (and the rest of the world, for that matter) are more or less on their own to build the appropriate skills and knowledge for educating the public about the law.
If the PLE movement was to boost its professional development opportunities, what should it do? Does PLEI need a degree or certificate program in the universities? Does it need a licensing process, complete with regulatory body?
The only thing I’ve ever found that addresses these questions is a 2006 article by Aisha Topsakal (formerly of Éducaloi) and Barbara Cuber, Thinking Outside the Law Faculty: A Call for a Specialized PLE Program [LINK]; this article appears in the first, and so far only, issue of Focus Justice, the magazine of the McGill Legal Information Clinic.
Topsakal and Cuber propose a PLE program that would be based out of the law faculty, but have a multidisciplinary scope. Specifically, the program they envision would focus on five areas beyond the standard law school curriculum:
- Educational theory and techniques
- Effective communication skills
- Organizational and human resource management
- Psychology and social work
- Sociological and historical understanding
The authors see this program not just as a way for law students interested in PLE to prepare themselves for it, but also as a force for guiding law schools toward a more interdisciplinary approach and a more cooperative and friendly public posture. They even point out that sensitivity to the issues that PLE faces “can benefit all future lawyers by nourishing client-centered professional relationships built on mutual understanding.”
I know from field interviews that some of you would base any specialized PLE program out of the education faculty, not the law school. Others of you, I expect, would add library sciences to the list of multidisciplinary focuses (the authors do note that their list is “non-exhaustive”). Still others don’t see much of a need for a formal PLE program in the first place. Indeed, it’s not even clear how many PLE professionals in Canada chose their job and how many simply stumbled into it.
Is PLEI a truly viable career move? If so, how should people be preparing themselves for it?
March 6, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Thanks for posting this note, Ritchie. This is a topic I have long been interested in. From time to time I have tried to gather up materials used by various organizations to orient new staff and board members to see what kinds of in-house training is going on and what pre-service and in-service training might be needed and wanted.
Part of the process of being able to provide any sort of pre-service or in-service education is assembling a body of knowledge that can then be communicated. My latest effort in this regard is the Theory and Practice of PLE website. I’m trying to use it to assemble various documents or other representations of our knowledge, organize it in some way, provide some sythesis statements of bodies of knowledge that are taking shape, and make all that readily available to people who are interested.
I have come to the conclusion that there would not be a market for a formal credentialled program in PLE. At one time I had visions of us getting together to take responsiblity for some aspect of PLE and provide some structured learning opportunities to people interested in getting involved in PLE. But there are too few opportunities in too broadly disbursed aspects of PLE to make conventional forms of learning viable.
So I have cast about for alternatives. I think just-in-time, knowledge management and mobilization strategies fit our needs better. I’m hoping to build an interactive dimension to the site that enables knowledge-sharing on an on-going basis. Your work in populating the site with materials and information you have collected in your travels will be invaluable in moving this project forward. Keep up the great work!
Lois