SuperCollege Bike RideAs you know, BikeTexas operates the Texas SuperCyclist Program (a bike safety curriculum and certification training program for elementary P.E. teachers) as part of our mission to promote bicycle safety. But you may not know that we also teach the teachers of the teachers!
We do that through the SuperCollege Project – colleges and universities incorporate the SuperCyclist curriculum into teacher certification training courses. The Texas Bicycle Coalition Education Fund trained university and college faculty instructs future teachers on how to implement the SuperCyclist Curriculum in their classroom. The materials and support are free to these institutions, and the Education Fund provides a DVD copy of the SuperCyclist Curriculum for each student teacher.
Tere Ramirez, Lecturer at UT-Austin in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education, participated in the SuperCyclist training for college faculty. Her class, KIN 119 Adventures Activities, introduces the SuperCyclist Curriculum to her students studying to be teachers. On November 3, 2008, Tere brought a new group of students training to be P.E. teachers to the BikeTexas offices, where we provided the bikes and expertise for a bike ride and safety orientation, and introduced them to the curriculum.
The future teachers learned the 7 Texas Laws, the parts of a bike, how to do an ABCD Quick Check, helmet fitting and tips on how to ride in a group. After the orientation, the group rode down the street to a parking lot where they tried out one of SuperCyclist Skills Courses and practiced scanning, then rode down the hike-and-bike trail and into a neighborhood to practice the skills they had learned.
One of Tere’s former students, Angie Helvey, is now an apprentice teacher at Zilker Elementary in Austin. Angie learned about the SuperCylist Curriculum in the November 2007 Adventure Activities Class. She is now sharing her SuperCyclist knowledge with the students of Zilker Elementary – in addition to teaching them bicycle safety, she created a display in her gym of the 7 Texas Laws used in the SuperCyclist Curriculum.
By training college faculty, Texas Bicycle Coalition hopes to reach hundreds of students training to be teachers. Once the students become teachers they are in a position to teach the SuperCylist program to thousands of Texas elementary students.
