Teaching the teachers to teach

One of the things I've been trying to think about recently is resources that I can get from the university. I started out under the impression that most of the resources that I think I need are not available at the university. They're simply not going to teach me how to put in a garden, raise animals, or build my own house. Or, if they do, it won't be in the way that I want them to do so.

But, lately I've been thinking about furthering my own career, as well as trying to broaden my perspective on what the university has to offer, and I've come up with some interesting possibilities.

In terms of my own work, I haven't yet given up on teaching as an ongoing career. I still plan to finish my degree and do what I can with it, and I'm hoping to do it fairly quickly so it won't be too expensive. But I've realised that the university has free programs for its grad students that I can use and that might just help me get a job down the road, which is useful.

So today I signed up for their teaching certificate program. It has a few different components to teach grad students how to be better teachers, including lectures and workshops. It'll take a bit of time to do, but hopefully it will make it a bit easier for me to get a job down the road, and to keep doing what I love.

But it also struck me, as I was reading about the program and what it offers, that many of the things it teaches are more widely useful. A lot of the focus is on how to teach or, more broadly, how to effective communicate information in an engaging way so people can learn from it. While this is useful in teaching, I suspect it's also going to be crucial in the kind of world that we're moving into. We're going to need to pass information to each other to survive, and show other people how to do things that they're just not familiar with. Need to know how to shear a sheep? Someone will probably have to show you. The same goes for any manner of jobs that are no longer common knowledge, from spinning to making a barrel and from growing a garden to building a cabin.

So, while it's maybe not exactly the kind of resources that I want in terms of practical peak oil skills, I'm trying to open my eyes to see what I can draw on that's free and easily available that might help me and others down the road. I also suspect that there might be other people who have access to similar programs that might be worth considering. Does your job offer special professional development courses on leadership or communication skills? Is your university willing to teach you study skills or how to more effectively research topics? These kind of courses might not be immediately applicable to peak oil, but they offer skills that we're going to need more than ever, especially as we try to revive and transmit other skills that will be necessary to our survival. We're going to need to know how to learn and research and teach in effective way that allow us to know and share the information that will help to keep us alive. And this, I suspect, makes them absolutely worth looking into.