Teaching the Librarian ID Skills

During my time in the Peace Corps so far, I’ve had the opportunity to realize its promise of organizational capacity building by personally training staff on digital tools such as Canva and Google Calendar, social media communications, the monitoring and evaluation process, video editing, and more.

This past week, I worked on what is probably my most personal project to date: teaching a local how to think like an instructional designer. 

One Peace Corps approach to community development is "appreciative inquiry," which means building on the strengths that already exist within a community. As an instructional designer, I always hoped to find the knowledge, talents, and know-how of the people I serve and help them create learning experiences for their fellow villagers. Passing on my knowledge of instructional theory is a way to create a long-term, sustainable impact after I am gone.

When the librarian told me she wanted to do a training on media literacy for the seniors in the village and asked for my help, I was thrilled to coach her through the instructional design process. Together, we hammered out a 1.5 hour workshop using Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Knowles’ Assumptions of Andragogy.

Though she was nervous at first to facilitate, by the time we finished designing the training, she felt knowledgeable and confident, and it showed. The participants were engaged and eager to share their experiences, hear new ideas, and apply their learning to critically examine media.

In the end, the librarian was delighted by the success of the workshop. I was doubly impressed by her facilitation skills, which contributed as much as the design itself to its success.

This kind of work is exactly why I joined the Peace Corps after graduate school instead of going straight into my career. I wanted to use what I had learned to help strengthen a community here in Moldova and contribute to building peace and friendship between nations.

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Moldovan Government.