Mentorship Opportunities

Mentorship are critical for sustainable development of new skills as well as research and teaching and learning cultures. RCCP II will focus on mentoring Carpentry Instructors in 2018/2019 but hope to learn from the experience and expand these mentorship opportunities in future.

Online Lesson Participation

In 2018, the Carpentries Task Force aim to run several online sessions for trained Carpentry instructors, to learn more about the tools and techniques employed by the Carpentries in the classroom.

The first online training opportunity ran in March and April over six weeks and included the following lessons:

  • 20 March 2018: Data organization in spreadsheets (taught by Katrin Tirok)
  • 27 March 2018: Cleaning data with OpenRefine (taught by Kayleigh Lino)
  • 3 April 2018: R - Before we start and Introduction to R (taught by Anelda van der Walt)
  • 10 April 2018: R - Starting with data (taught by Anelda van der Walt)
  • 17 April 2018: R - Aggregating and analyzing data with dplyr (taught by Caroline F. Ajilogba)
  • 24 April 2018: R - Data visualization with ggplot2 (taught by Lactatia Motsuku)

Subsequent online training opportunities were cancelled due to lack of interest from instructors. The time committment over several weeks was cited as a problem given the academic calendar.

Monthly Carpentry Instructors Meetups

Since 2017 a monthly meeting has been running where Carpentry instructors from Africa come together to discuss recent or upcoming workshops, lessons learned, opportunities, challenges, and more. These sessions will continue to run under the umbrella of the RCCP II Capacity Development Initiative in 2018/2019.

Please sign up to participate by visiting our Etherpad. Participation open for anyone in Africa who has attended a Carpentry instructor training workshop.

Pre-workshop Mentoring Sessions

The Carpentries Task Force will provide support to instructors and helpers who will be teaching/helping at upcoming workshops prior to the events. Task force members will assist with preparation of lessons, general questions about the Carpentries teaching methodologies, code of conduct, and more.