Introduction to Permaculture
One of the most invigorating things that I do is to regularly teach the Introductions to Permaculture for Brighton Permaculture Trust. I have the privilege to share my passion with a bunch of people that want to learn about something inspiring, grounded and empowering. How brilliant is that? Brilliant. The last four Intros that we have run, we have had trainee teachers observing the courses, with the aim for them to become permaculture teachers. A great job got better.
Daniel, Helen and Millie during the Web of Life activity. All photos by Bex Harris
This time, we did quite a major re-tweak of the course. We decided to re-design it to introduce SADIM earlier on in the course, and to frame the course with SADIM. We introduced the design activity on the morning of the first day and integrated learning with using it for the design activity. We then had the practical at the end of day 2 to compound some of the learning. One of the tweaks was to link the web of life and the practical, so we used the same elements in the web of life as we were going to be using in mulching an apple tree and creating a guild. Lots of the link that people came up with during the web of life were fairly tenuous, but it was fun.
It was fascinating to do it and see how it worked. We evaluated it at the end, and there are many things that we liked about the new version, but it is still a work in progress. It sounds like the participants were happy too they liked:
‘structure of the day was fun and varied with recognisable direction’
‘tutor intuition was really good’
‘mixture of learning methods (video, sitting, doing, groups, games etc). Holistic in each instance.’
One participant even blogged about it in this post
but I think my favourite piece of feedback was
‘ I liked discovering that permaculture exists already in my life and I didn’t recognise it and now I just need to enhance its existence.’
hedvig's permaculture adventures 