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?