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