we at community cycles in boulder are working on offering a paid-for mechanic's class, similar to bici-centro's model, and as such, would be very interested in collaborating on coming up with a cohesive, self contained curriculum that includes instructor sheets and student handouts.
 one thing that ed and christine from bici-centro expressed as very helpful with their model--and I'm thinking it will fit with our model as well--is that their 8 weekly classes are all very self contained, so that the class can be taught in a modular way. students can drop in take one class that they're interested in, or take all of the classes completely out of order, and still gain from the class.


On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 9:51 PM, Jonathan Morrison <jonathan@slcbikecollective.org> wrote:
Why reinvent the wheel?
 
For mechanics I would use a combination of bicycletutor.com videos & the Park Tool School, you may be plugging a name, but they have a really convinent instructor manual and student guide (that they keep).  The Big Blue Book and the instructor manual can be purchased at cost via QBP.
 
For Safety education, I would get the LAB to certify some of your volunteers as LCIs.  They just came out with a really good version of their Road I booklet.
 
With both those as boiler plate options, a good instructor will be able to pick and choose what they want to teach based on time and audience.
 
--
Sincerely,

Jonathan Morrison
Executive Director
Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective
2312 S. West Temple
Salt Lake City, UT 84115
w: 801-328-2453
c: 801-688-0183
f: 801-466-3856
www.slcbikecollective.org

Get Addicted to Crank!
http://www.slcbikecollective.org/crank/

The mission of the Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective is to promote cycling as an effective and sustainable form of transportation and as a cornerstone of a cleaner, healthier, and safer society. The Bicycle Collective provides refurbished bicycles and educational programs to the community, focusing on children and lower income households.


On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Ryan Guzy <ryanguzy@gmail.com> wrote:
We just started an advanced maintenance class at Bike Saviours in Tempe, AZ. We're targeting people who are potential volunteers. The goal is to show the general principles so that they can work on any bike they come across, and also so that they can begin to teach others. The class will get them exposed to all of the maintenance aspects, and we envision them working as assistant mechanics during our shop hours to gain experience after the class session is over.

We wrote some instructor sheets over the past few months and have been teaching off of them. Right now I have them on Google Docs and I plan on putting them on the Wiki. I'd like to gather material and make handouts to go with each class too. Right now we're just using the same sheet as a handout even though it is kind of dense.

I have also been talking to Christine at Bici Centro about working on a curriculum together. She is working on some good material for a basic class. I've also seen other material out there that has good diagrams that are free to use.

I think if we can gather interested people to collaborate online we can put out some really good material that we can all use.

--Ryan


On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Boson Au <boson.au@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi everyone, Boson from Baltimore, MD's Velocipede Bike Project...

First of all, @ bike!bike! the education-related workshops were the one that inspired/interested me the most.  We got back and the first thing I want to kick-start was our clinic program which had be suspended due to a multitude of reasons... anyways...

so we're about to reinstate our bike clinic series (previously we had one person do ALL the teaching and she's about to leave out of town for 3 months so we've decided that we're going to try to have a group of educators rotate classes) and I'm interested in any organizations that hold regular classes...  This isn't exactly a youth program but more like a general public thing.  We do have a curriculum, but I'm kind of interested in other project's solutions.  If any project has their own curriculum set up and want to trade/compare notes that'd be so awesome.



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