JMB University

What Bushcraft Skills Are Applicable In The Modern World?

by Tim Smith on March 11, 2010 · 1 comment

The question of how our bushcraft courses are applicable in the modern world comes up from time to time both in email and through discussions, so I wanted to formally address it today.

When examined from a sufficient distance so as to blur the specific skills, our courses teach four things: problem solving, leadership, self-reliance and confidence.  These are learned experientially, which means that they are lived all day, every day.  Unlike many formal learning programs, they aren’t abstractions discussed on a whim using hypothetical situations

In the classroom, on the field, and later in the business world, these are the building blocks of success.  More about each;

Problem Solving: Building shelters, lighting fires, and other common bushcraft tasks are problem solving exercises.  Given a few simple tools and the available natural resources, can you make yourself comfortable and build a life for yourself?  If so, you have to figure out how.  But figuring problems out is where most exercises stop.  In bushcraft, it’s less than half the battle.  The real learning comes with the execution of the plan.  This is where you learn if the solutions arrived at were any good.

Leadership: Leadership is often “taught” in courses where one is the leader for the exercise or the day.  I would argue that this is more often management than leadership.  Real leadership evolves when working toward an outcome with no direct path to get there.  It involves management, but also how to inspire and create a desire for excellence in those being led.

Self-Reliance: Self-reliance is a rare commodity in our world, and becoming rarer still.  Many people have difficulty thinking or acting without being told what to do and how to do it.  Those who can be self-reliant in their thoughts and actions, while few, are sought after.  Bushcraft is an incubator for self-reliance.  Beginning with the hands-on and tangible, it facilitates doing and thinking for yourself and results in an independence few experience these days.

Confidence: We start small on our programs, building as we progress.  The difficulty of tasks increases proportionally with skill and experience.  People who think they can do something occasionally fail.  People who know they can rarely do.  Our goal is to create people who know they can because they’ve done it before.  Developing the “I know I can” attitude can fundamentally change someone’s life.

So while we don’t teach bushcraft as a vehicle for personal growth, these are the transferable consequences of learning it.

Russ Venditto On The Bushcraft Learning Process

by Tim Smith on December 11, 2009

Our first online course, titled “Becoming A Bushcraft Instructor,”, has been a great experience thus far. We’ve had some thoughtful discussions about our first book, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, which examines how the brain processes information. I’ve been learning a lot from the discussion. As a sample, below is a post from Russ Venditto on the learning process and how it translates to bushcraft. Enjoy, and if you want to join us check our our online network at http://jackmtn.ning.com/:

“It is by logic we prove; it is by intuition we discover.”

I’d say that learning about a concept, or that having gone over information in d-mode — even multiple times — isn’t enough to fully understand a subject. This goes for science, math, literature, or anything, really, but since we’re looking at this from a bushcraft instructor’s point of view, here are my thoughts. Throughout this whole chapter, I kept thinking about the manual skills involved in a bushcraft course: use of an axe, use of small hand tools, and firemaking methods, to be specific. It is very important to have a grasp of the theory behind these skills. Giving Tommy an axe and saying “here, figure out how to use this” could be disastrous. Far better to brief him on the axe, on safety, angle of attack, proper kinesthetic technique, and so on, than to leave him to his own devices. BUT…

But because the student has been told how to do something, he or she is not magically gifted with the ability to do said something. There needs to be a learning period, in which the student has to discover how to apply the information that has just been passed on. “Here’s a spokeshave, this is how you use it” is great; the instructor shows the student the motions used to shave wood with this wonderful tool, and the student has an idea of how to use the tool. He feels confident that he can reproduce what the instructor has just done… until he tries to handle the spokeshave and suddenly realizes that it is a LOT harder than it looks. At first, that is. After some time — or after much time, depending on the person — using a spokeshave becomes second nature, something that now magically IS as easy as it looks.

The same magical transformation applies to firemaking (as it does to every other discipline, I’d imagine)… when learning it for the first time, you are shown and told what to do, in small steps. The first three dozen times you try to make a coal with a hand drill, you get a ton of smoke, but no fire. Then one day, on your forty-third attempt, a coal appears. How?

I would guess that what is happening here is that while d-mode is telling you that you are failing at your task, the undermind is storing all of the information gathered during your attempts. Over time, you develop an intuition on how this whole hand drill thing works. Your undermind goes on evaluating and sorting this information — this works, that doesn’t — the entire time you are working at the project, and also while you are NOT at work. You have a much more complete understanding of the skills required of a hand drill on your thirtieth attempt than you did on your third, even if you still have not produced a coal.

The quote applies becuase at first we learn the skills, the theory, that which can be verbalized, as Claxton says. That which CANNOT be verbalized — all of the intricacies and idiosyncrasies involved in the physical process — have to be learned through doing, and over time, we develop an “intuition” on the topic, be it axemanship or field botany. I think this is why a focus on “process, not product” is so effective.

Jack Mountain Bushcraft University

by Tim Smith on April 22, 2008

I saw an ad for a college today and in the photo they had as their centerpiece was a student in a lecture hall looking toward the front and acting interested. That’s a negative for me. I remember sitting through a bunch of lectures, some great, some not, but what I took away from the experience was that I wasn’t involved. I was a passive observer, reading about the work and research of others. Were I to be applying to school again, I’d want to see an ad featuring people doing things, not just listening to people talk about things or reading things, to be impressed. Our bodies are built for action. To simply sit and take in information isn’t learning. This is why I’ve spent the last ten years developing and running our hands-on semester programs and am currently expanding them into a yearlong program. But there is another part to the learning experience.

My most positive academic experiences were in graduate school. Gone was the lecture format, and in it’s place were a bunch of motivated learners. We would read a lot, write a lot, and engage in meaningful discussions about the topics we were covering. We would share our writings with one another via email, and comment on each other’s work. Such is my goal; adding an academic component to a practical endeavor.

For much of the knowledge of bush lore, background study is required for mastery of the practical skill. It’s not necessary to successfully accomplish the skill. However, it adds a great depth of knowledge which enriches the experience, and is a prerequisite to being a competent instructor.

I think we’ve reached a turning point in education. Modern universities charge a lot of money for a piece of paper saying that you did the work and met the lowest common denominator of their program. But the cost has grown so much that many are looking for an alternative. Our approach will be different. It will be open to everyone and the work will speak for itself through a peer and facilitator-reviewed portfolio and logbook assessment system.

This program will not replace our hands-on, residential programs, but it will complement them, and allow us to serve many people who are unable to come to us for a course. There is no way to replace direct, hands-on instruction. But if that instruction is complemented with a rigorous course of academic study, the result is greater than the sum of the components. It results in a depth of practical and theoretical knowledge unattainable by other means.

The difference between this and simply studying alone is in actually doing the work, documenting it, and having it peer-reviewed. Putting in your time with field guides. Spending time on focused study. In a world inundated with information, the temptation is to approach information like many people watch television – flipping through the channels with the remote control. But flipping through things like this isn’t learning. It isn’t even studying. How much have you learned from the magazines in your bathroom?

Our goal is to create a community of lifelong learners who understand that focused study is the route to knowledge and comprehension, and ultimately mastery. The tools and the technology are all available for free or at a very low cost. What’s left is to actually do the work.

Tuition Cost: The tuition cost for JMBU is twofold. First, you have to do the work. Second, you have to review the work of your peers.

Requirements: Participants are required to actually do the work and document it. In order to avoid having it turn into something that people just blow off, if the work isn’t done people are dropped from a course.

Facilitators: We’d encourage anyone who had successfully completed a course to stay on as a facilitator. We’d try to get as many people involved as possible, so as to spread the workload.

Assessment: Keeping Track Of What You Do. If you don’t document your work, it didn’t happen. Your documentation of your work is part of your portfolio, as explained in the student handbook, and is reviewed by peers and the course facilitator. But it’s not like school. You don’t get grades. Your work speaks for itself. The purpose of the review process is to make sure you’re on the right track, and to ensure you’re not making outlandish, untrue claims (ie. “I made five full-sized birch bark canoes today before lunch.”) Documentation is public and kept on the web so everyone can read it. This way it can also serve as a peer-reviewed resume if someone wanted to use their logbook as proof of what they’ve done in applying for a job, etc.

Goals:
Academic complement to a hands-on training course
Create an open-source, peer-reviewed model of education
Develop critical thinking skills
Create a community of lifelong learners who value traditional knowledge for it’s own sake

How We Do It:
Each student starts a blog on a free service such as blogger to host their logbook and work. On their bio page on the Jack Mountain Network, they add the blog feed. This allows their posts to be commented on by others without having to spend hours navigating the web. We’ll provide links and a short how-to explaining how to set this up. They can set up the blog and their account with us under a pseudonym as long as the other people on their course know what their real name is (because it sucks trying to have a rational discussion with “bushmaster007″).

The lesson is posted on the web with start and finish dates, along with an abstract of what the course will entail. People sign up, get set up, and start working. Each course becomes a separate group on the network to facilitate communication.

Weekly expectations are set by the facilitator. People can comment on either the blog or the Ning network page saying they’ve read it, and ask any questions that are necessary.

Upon the completion of the course, the logbook (in this case, the blog) is printed out and mailed to the facilitator, who signs off on it in ink. It’s then mailed back to the student, and is a record of the completed course. Student pays for postage. If this turns into a huge pain (ie. shipping overseas), we’ll look into other ways of doing it.

If you’ve got comments about this, let me know by posting them in our online network at:

http://jackmtn.ning.com