11 Sep, 2018 | Education
Rowe Morrow & Hannah Moloney will lead a permaculture teacher training in Ballarat from Saturday evening Nov 17 to Friday Nov 23, 2018.
Rowe will also then be attending the Yandoit Shindig and PEG gathering on the 24th & 25th. Most of the regular permaculture teacher training events on the permaculture calendar are in NSW so we’re very pleased to create this event in Victoria. Permaculture Australia will receive the majority of funds raised from the event, which is being run by Ballarat Permaculture Guild Inc.
To apply, email steve@chestnutfarm.net.au for an application form. Registration will not be through the BPG website but by direct application.
This course is designed to provide the necessary skills and confidence to deliver the internationally recognised Permaculture Design Certificate curriculum to students anywhere. Students will be able to develop a curriculum, structure a short or long course to maximise student learning, and design effective learning resources. By the end of the course all participants will have had the hands-on experience of a range of teaching methods and strategies, and will understand how to inspire and engage learners in a way that results in deep and meaningful learning.
Rowe has a very student-centred approach so if your experience so far has been lecture-style delivery, this could be a great opportunity to learn some new approaches. Even if you’ve been teaching for some years and are quite comfortable with your own teaching approach & style, attending this training could be a fabulous networking & collaboration opportunity as you’ll be working in small groups with the other students. You’ll learn more about existing colleagues and get to meet some of the ‘up-and-comers’!
There are two scholarship places available at the reduced fee level of $400. These will be awarded based on additional information provided by students who can show how their completion of this training will advance permaculture and their communities. What that looks like will be different in every case. Students might, for instance, show how they will create significant community benefit or introduce permaculture to a new cohort of learners. Letters of support from relevant stakeholders will strengthen a scholarship application. Scholarship applications will be received until October 1st and successful applicants will be contacted shortly thereafter.
Please note that if you enrol, you are required to attend ALL sessions. There have been issues on previous courses with students opting in and out of various sessions depending on their interest, perceived competence or need to deal with other business or pressures. If you know in advance that you can’t attend all sessions, please don’t enrol. Make arrangements to have pressing business dealt with by others so that you can focus fully on this great opportunity.
Course fee is $800 and includes:
6 days training & group work, including evenings (9am – 9 pm)
class notes & resources
morning and afternoon tea & supper
catered lunch & dinner on-site
Course fee does not include accommodation or breakfast. There are nearby accommodation options ranging from camping to hotels.
More about your teachers…
Rowe Morrow is an internationally renowned Permaculture Teacher who has written numerous permaculture books, including The Earth User’s Guide to Teaching Permaculture and Permaculture Teaching Matters. She has taught the Permaculture Design Course (PDC), and her popular Teacher Training Course, throughout Australia as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She has co-taught with Lis Bastian, co-founder of the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute, for the last decade. Both she and Lis are passionate about teaching permaculture in a range of contexts, from communities and organisations, to business and government. Rowe is particularly interested in teaching permaculture in war-torn countries like Afghanistan, as well as countries facing major social or economic challenges, like Portugal, Spain and Greece.
Hannah Moloney grew up on a city farm in Brisbane (QLD) growing herbs and has over a decade of hands-on experience in designing, building, managing and doing projects around urban agriculture, small-scale farming, permaculture and community development. She has a post-grad diploma in Community cultural development, completed her Permaculture Design Course in 2008 and since 2009, has been teaching permaculture across Australia with the likes of the Southern Cross Permaculture Institute, the Permaforest Trust (which has since closed) and Milkwood Permaculture.In 2011 she completed a Diploma of Permaculture with Eltham College. In recent years Hannah has had the pleasure of teaching alongside some of the most celebrated permaculturalists in the world including David Holmgren (co-founder of permaculture), Rosemary Morrow and Dave Jacke (US author of Edible Forest Gardens). In 2015 she was awarded the Tasmanian ‘Young Landcare Leader Award’ for her work with Good Life Permaculture and co-establishing Hobart City Farm.
6 Sep, 2018 | Education
Calling all students and teachers of permaculture at all levels. Permaculture Australia’s Education Team is working on an interactive web page using this snail graphic:
We hope to populate the page with an inventory of all courses past and present in all the categories on the snail. To do this we will need your help to review the page as it is developed and to send us feedback and suggestions.
Some categories (such as PDC) will need to be organised by State, and probably even by venue or year, or some mechanism for identifying courses. It is a tall order but something that has been called for for many times.
For current courses, we will link to member information on the Permaculture Australia webpage only, and for past courses we will be looking for articles and other useful information.
In tandem with this initiative, and in order to identify future needs, we will be undertaking a national survey and we ask that you help us disseminate it far and wide. The more complete the responses, the more likely we are to inspire solutions and the establishment of new courses.
We look forward to developing a rich and inspiring educational mycelium with your help.
The Permaculture Australia Education Team education@permacultureaustralia.org.au
19 Jun, 2018 | General
Timor Leste has made the teaching of permaculture a compulsory subject in the primary school curriculum. Under the curriculum endorsed by the Timorese government in 2015, all primary schools are required to teach permaculture to students in Grades 3 to 6.
The inclusion of Permaculture is the brainchild of Ego Lemos, founder and director of the not-for-profit organisation Permatil (Permaculture Timor Leste) and co-author of The Tropical Permaculture Guidebook.
Ego Lemos and Lachlan McKenzie launch the new edition of Permatil’s Tropical Permaculture Guidebook at the Timor Leste Embassy, Canberra, 18 April 2018.
Ego convinced the Education Department that these were important, life-long skills, that the program would produce food for school lunches, be an entry point for parents to participate in school life and an opportunity for spreading skills to the wider community to improve nutrition and food production in home gardens.
Through the hands-on program, children are taught a range of permaculture techniques including:
- growing vegetables
- designing a garden
- techniques for composting
- integrated pest management
- living fences
- seed collection and storage
- tree nursery
- …and lots more.
In Ego’s words, school gardens are also used for ‘active learning in a living book or laboratory’ to convey skills and knowledge. It is important to bring the learning experience outside and make it practical. It can link to other aspects of the curriculum: science, maths, literacy, social science, natural science, problem solving and adapting to climate change.
Despite its inclusion in the curriculum, the government has not provided funding for the program. This is not to dismiss the program. It’s the reality of widespread lack of funding for schools in Timor Leste and includes greater issues like low pay or no pay for teachers and poorly resourced schools. Some may have few or no reading books and some are even without drinking water or toilets.
Permatil responded to the funding gap by undertaking to implement and support the curriculum program. It began with two pilot schools in late 2015. The Permatil volunteer staff worked to form and train parent committees to build and care for the garden and work alongside teachers. They found donors to fund the implementation and, school-by-school, they had success. Today, just three years later, it has expanded to around the 178 schools currently in the program.
Funding has mostly come from small NGO’s, including from Australian Timor Leste friendship groups. This network of groups has been operating since 2002 linking communities in Australia with a partner community in Timor Leste. Groups fund the program in schools in their partner communities. The Friends of Manatuto, based in the City of Kingston in Melbourne see it as ‘an ideal project – it is Timorese driven and Timorese run and seeks to address the immediate basic needs of food security and nutrition.
Ego was introduced to permaculture soon after the country obtained its independence in 1999 by Australian permie, Steve Cran, who became a close friend and mentor. Since then Ego has tried a number of methods to reach communities and encourage them to take up permaculture practices. He has travelled widely in the country directly teaching techniques to subsistence farmers, establishing school permaculture gardens and running youth permaculture camps. He believes that working with schools is the most effective strategy to impact practices in the broader community and increase production of home gardens. The program is carefully planned through a series of stages:
- establishing a community parents’ committee specifically for the program
- running workshops which are open to the whole community
- training volunteer community members to assist with running the program locally with the support of trained Permatil staff
- requiring students to bring materials from home for the gardens – e.g. a bag of goat manure, sticks for fencing
- encouraging students to talk to their families about what they learn, and establish gardens around their houses — some schools even give homework requiring this and the teacher will go to each student’s house to assess their compost and work
- providing support for local community groups and associations to establish gardens
- encouraging attendees of youth camps to become involved in school gardens.
Timor has 1108 primary schools, so there’s still a long way to go to establish gardens in all of them and still lots of funding to be found.
An evaluation of the permaculture in school program will be undertaken in June/July this year to assess the impact the program is having in the schools as well as broader issues such as student engagement with school, household food security and health, etc.
Lessons learned from successes and difficulties so far will be used to improve the program’s effectiveness and assess if it is achieving its goals. The results will be used to attract funding to implement the program in the remaining 926 primary schools across Timor.
The evaluation is being funded by donations from a range of groups including the friends groups, Permafund and a wonderful collective donation made by the attendees at the APC14 in Canberra in April.
If you would like to help make this happen, you can make a tax deductible donation through Permaculture Australia’s Permafund via this link (put ‘Permatil school gardens’ in the description for direct deposits).
Written by Robyn Erwin
Evaluation Team Leader & Chair of Friends of Manatuto
A woman at Australasian Permaculture Convergence 14 in Canberra in April 2018 drops a donation into the hat passed around to collect funds for Permatil.
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13 Mar, 2018 | PA News, Education
Do you offer courses in permaculture or permaculture-related skills?
Would you like some help with promotion?
Permaculture Australia is hosting a stall at PermaFest18 on Sunday 15th April in Canberra where we want to showcase the wide range of offerings in Permaculture education. So, if you offer courses or workshops anywhere in Australia in anything related to Permaculture, please make contact so that we can include you. PDC, Intro, Diploma, short course, skills workshop, teacher training, school or community program – we aim to showcase the rich choices available in permaculture education all over Australia.
Formal or informal, accredited or not, on-line or face-to-face, funded or self-finding, the opportunities and choices are vast and we would love to celebrate everything. Membership of PA not necessary.
Whether you are attending APC14 or not, you can provide us with brochures, cards or other printed information for distribution, or display, or you can give us electronic links which we will make available at the stall.
Email Virginia at vsolomon@netspace.net.au before April 8th and please feel free to pass on this offer to any other educators you know.
7 Feb, 2018 | Education
A PA member recently requested to know some options for where/how to do a Permaculture Diploma. In Australia, the options are:
Qualifications accredited in the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF):
- Accredited vocational training in Permaculture => AHC52115 Diploma of Permaculture. Available at:
Awards that are not accredited in the AQF but which have a long pedigree as internationally recognised study with an experienced mentor:
- The Diploma in Permaculture (http://www.permaculturevisions.com/courses/diploma-in-permaculture)
- Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute offer a diploma (http://www.bluemountainspermacultureinstitute.com.au/sample-page-1)
Notes to consider:
- The Diploma of Permaculture (AHC52115) is intended for people working in communities, designing large projects, teaching and training to this level, strategic planning at a relatively large scale and local government/business initiatives etc. The Diploma of Permaculture is an 18 month (3 semesters or equivalent) course where participants are trained to be job-ready for a managerial career in permaculture. They are likely to be working in a leadership capacity for organisations, groups, or enterprises and in jobs involving a whole system approach to planning, design, management and implementation of integrated permaculture projects and programs, permaculture community programs, and the operation of permaculture enterprises.
- Options 3 & 4 are non-formal, non-accredited awards available more generally and linked to the knowledge and teacher-pupil relationship of the PDC whereas Options 1 & 2 are accredited certified training (ie something where the endpoint is a career/job in permaculture).
References:
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