Ideas and topics for regular subcommunity calls

[acrall]

At the 13 December meeting, a question was asked on what topics others have included as part of their community calls. It was generally advised that each community coordinator reach out to members at a set frequency (quarterly, annually) to see what programming would be of interest to them. This issue will be a place to record ideas and topics that can be adopted by others in the community.

[acrall]

If you do not have anything to add to an agenda for a regular call, you may want to use that time solely for community building and networking. You could play online games like Drawasaurus or develop a guessing game using emojis. There are many ideas for doing this with movies (e.g, Guess the movie from these emojis: 🏃🏻‍♂️ 🦐 🍫 Answer: Forrest Gump). You break the group into teams, each having its own breakout room, to see how many each team can guess in the time allotted. This is to serve as a reminder that your regular meetings do not always need to have structured content. Folks enjoy having space to relax and spend time with their friends and community

[acrall]

@elletjies shared information on programming offered at The Carpentries in Africa monthly calls in 2022

• Shared experiences as an Instructor
• GitHub Skillup with Toby Hodges
• Where to start with self-organising your Carpentries Workshop
• SADiLaR
• H3ABioNet
• Carpentries in Kenya - Bioinformatics Hub Initiative in Kenya
• Networking
• LANFRICA - connecting all African language resources
• Sharing experiences as an Instructor/Instructor in Training/Teacher in 2022
• Glosario Hackathon

[acrall]

Identify a book of interest to the group to read and dedicate the calls to discussion on specific chapters. Check out the Book Clubs chapter in our Community Cookbook.

[acrall]

The resource has not been updated since 2019, but there are lots of great ideas in The Carpentries Community Cookbook

• Help Sessions
• Hacky Hour
• Carpentries Study Groups

[sstevens2]

From Midwest US Carpentries Community:

• Open discussion of what the community is interested in talking about
• The Maintainers' Perspective: How to improve the checkout process from issue to completed PR
• Carpentries Workbench Overview and Q&A
• Workshop Assessment
• Instructor Training Best Practices
• Building the regional Library Carpentry capacity/community
• Workshop Administration
• Demo of making a lesson contribution using Github
• Incubator Lesson Showcase
• The Carpentries at Smaller (non-R1) Institutions (R1 is a research level designation for institutions in the US)
• Teaching Debugging
• How things work at your institution - share and discuss

From UW-Madison Carpentries Community:

• Imposter Syndrome Discussion
• Improv session to improve on-the-fly teaching skills
• CarpentryCon Follow-up (watch a video and discuss it)
• Stereotype Treat Discussion
• Promoting the Carpentries to new and diverse audiences discussion
• Backward Design, Active Learning, and Carpentries
• Culturally relevant pedagogy discussion
• Social event
• Discussion of How to handle a Code of Conduct violation
• How can we get Data/Software Carpentry into graduate education at our institution
• Skill-up: Data Driven CV (with Rmarkdown)
• Data science education options (short courses, masters degree etc)

List of ideas we brainstormed at a previous meeting

- Strategies for continuing education for our instructor/helper pool - Developing exercises for lessons - Review and give feedback on lessons in development - What is it like to travel to teach Carpentries? - What is it like to teach at a centrally organized online Carpentries Workshop? - Getting Involved with the main Carpentries Org. - Brainstorm ways to recruit new helpers/instructors - Pedagogy paper discussions - Session to discuss what teaching skills we are working on / support group - Culturally relevant pedagogy & exploring our own cultural lenses - Practice talks with constructive criticism similar to instructor training - Discuss teaching data literacy - Instructional games - Making personal websites w/github - Brainstorm opps to have grad programs include Carpentry training in 1st year requirements - World cafe discussion on teaching coding/tools/languages - Live coding game / activity - Another improv session - Joint events / meetings with other training / DS / compute groups - Social event at the terrace (a local gathering spot) - The flipped classroom and how we can try this w/ Carpentries - Local discussion of current discussion topics/issues of concern/new initiatives coming out of the Carpentries Org? For example, local discussion on the same topic as a recent blog post from the Carpentries? I feel like I could do a better job of staying on top of what's happening at the org level, and maybe local discussions would help with that. - Discussion of favorite (teaching or software related) PLOS computational biology "10 simple rules for ___" articles - Strategies (and perhaps literature) for promoting active learning - Strategies to improve inclusivity in workshops - Present demographics of our past workshops over time - Lesson-planning/prep. How do different instructors prep their lessons/base them on the DC/SWC curriculum. - Getting over imposter syndrome as an instructor/handling questions that throw you off/the art of answering questions when you're up there. - Practice an aspect of teaching (doing intros, your live coding skills, etc.) - Strategies to improve inclusivity in workshops - Teaching pedagogy deep dive (motivation, assessment, metacognition) - Brainstorming ideas or planning interactive activities for the workshops - Using ‘the discussion book’ to try out different methods of discussion while discussing coding or teaching. - Discuss a chapter from [Teaching Tech Together](http://teachtogether.tech/)

Happy to answer questions about any of these session ideas or point to notes from a previous session!

[acrall]

This information was shared by someone from the University of Michigan subcommunity at our Communications Skill Up on 14 July 2023: At our Zoom meetings, it's useful to talk about feedback from recent workshops, incorporate prospective helpers & instructors, and plan for future workshops and develop our curricula. We've also had really great discussions at these meetings about the carpentries ethos after group-reading Teaching Tech Together.