Permaculture for Teachers

Permaculture for Teachers – a Socratic evaluation tool
by Michael Becker, Summer 2008, Bullock Teacher Training

Core ethics

Care of Earth

  • Do we take care of this site?
  • Do we endear people to more aspects of being outside?
  • Do people relate to the site/world differently after the experience?
  • Do we offer solutions?
  • Do we empower people to action with information options?

Care of People

  • Are basic needs easily met?
  • Do people learn by meeting their basic needs?
  • Do we communicate early on to relax fears/anxieties and maximize learning?

Fair Share/Intelligent redistribution

  • What are people going to take away?
  • If this was someone’s first experience, can they relate it back to someone who wasn’t here?

Principles

Relative location

  • Are things in the right place?
  • Is there a connective path to different learning areas?
  • Is the site used to model the learning goals?
  • Do people develop a sense of place and get their bearings?

Each Element provides many functions (stacking)

  • Do students experience the stacking concept?
  • Do students experience a flow within your team of instructors?
  • Are educational systems transparent?

Each Element supported by many functions (redundancy)

  • Are key learning objectives repeated throughout the day?
  • Do those repetitions vary in delivery styles?
  • Do they see, hear, experience those key ideas from a variety of people

Efficient Energy Planning

  • Are we minimizing empty travel?
  • If we are traveling, is the value of the travel maximized?
  • Are we allowing diversity in detail or spending too much time attempting to homogenize?

Use/Value Biological Resources

  • Are we teaching with the site in mind?
  • Are we thinking about weather, sun, shade, swims drinks, slopes, spaces able to absorb impacts or not?

Obtain a Yield

  • What is the goal yield/yields?
  • Can you check what people are leaving with?
  • Are there yields the group can provide on site?
  • What continuing/long term yields could be developed?
  • Do people sense an abundance of opportunity?

Energy cycling/recycling

  • Is it easy to find garbage/recycling?
  • Do we rally the group’s energy?
  • Is there a way to join the flow to after? (What is the next level?)
  • Can they reuse the experience in their lives soon?

Small Intensive systems – start where you are and build from there

  • Is the goal/scale matching the time frame?
  • Is the whole broken into digestible bits?
  • Do people blend into the landscape?

Accelerate succession

  • Can we increase the rate of understanding (using pictures, stories, songs, and games etc.)
  • Can we streamline people’s access to information to remove possible roadblocks?
  • Do we connect people with the next step?

Diversity is stability

  • Do we teach to a variety of learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic)
  • Do we offer many handles?
  • Do we find places/options in the system for varied experience and backgrounds?

Edge Effect

  • Are we maximizing personal interface with the topics chosen?
  • Are we increasing the edge of knowledge of the subject?
  • Are people interacting in personal zone edges 2-3? *

Creative Problem Solving (turn problems into solutions)

  • Do we get stuck in the micro and possibly miss the macro?
  • Do we follow a process that allows team members to be heard?
  • Do we allow members of the team different roles in the development of ideas?
  • Are students asked to solve problems?

Zones of personal space:

  • Self
  • Immediate comfortable physical surroundings
  • Comfortable range of thought
  • Mental/Physical discomfort
  • Trauma

*You want material to be challenging but not scary – learning happens on the edge of the comfort zone

Experiential Learning Cycle:

  • Stasis
  • New experience
  • Dis-equilibrium
  • Process/Analyze information/experience
  • Decision (accept, reject)
  • Expansion to new area of understanding
  • Internalize
  • Stasis