We are all teachers. Gramsci, concerned with conservative schooling for radical education, and engagement with the general intellect, had a view of intellectual life dissolved into the fabric of society. This is what the Third University is concerned with in the present moment. How do we empower each other by association to teach each other newness, new things, new comprehensions of the world? How do we empower each other to build alternatives. Or test alternatives?
The Third University has a wonderful offer from Natterjacks Bar on Narborough Road to use their space to do stuff. We want to do stuff dissolved into the community. In this moment that thing is an alternative to teacher training. Rather than accredited, monitored, assured, validated teaching as an adjunct of economic growth, we believe that everyone is able to teach something to someone, somewhere. So we will be running a session at Natterjacks. We hope. On alternative teacher training. Against a prescribed curriculum. Against a validated performance. Against performativity, precarity, economic progress and growth.
In classic Fight Club style, if you attend Third University’s alternative teacher training for the first time, then you must teach.
We want a learning outcome. Our learning outcome will be that participants will leave confident in their ability to teach something to someone somewhere. Participants will define what is useful for whom and where. We will assess this thing in classic Fight Club style. Third University expects that participants will have taught something to someone somewhere at some point.
More details will follow. Good Night and Good Luck.
#1 – The first rule of Alternative Teacher Training is, you do not talk about Alternative Teacher Training.
#2 – The second rule of Alternative Teacher Training is, you DO NOT talk about Alternative Teacher Training.
#3 – If some learner says stop, goes limp, taps out, the teach-in is over.
#4 – At least two participants to a teach-in.
#5 – One teach-in at a time.
#6 – No shirts, no shoes. If you like.
#7 – Teach-ins will go on as long as they have to.
#8 – If this is your first night at Alternative Teacher Training, you have to teach.
The Third University 
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