Transition Culture

A Way of Seeing - the art of teaching permaculture creatively (2003)

Permaculture Goes to College - the development of a pioneering permaculture course By Rob Hopkins (originally appeared in Permaculture Magazine Issue No. 33)

‘Permaculture – Designing for Sustainability’ is by a yearlong course run at the Kinsale Further Education Centre in Co. Cork, Ireland. It is the first time permaculture has been taught through the Adult Education system in Ireland, and in this article permaculture teacher and designer Rob Hopkins looks at how the course came about and how an approach to teaching known as Teaching Permaculture Creatively transformed the way he teaches it.

Permaculture first arrived on these shores with a Design Course taught by American permaculturist Dan Hemenway in the late eighties. This was followed by courses taught by Declan Kennedy, Marcus McCabe and Sandro Caffola, as well as Richard Webb and Dominic Waldron, and by Philip Allen, who has run a number of courses in Belfast. Most courses run here have been privately organized at various centers around the country. Ireland has two organic colleges, one in Leitrim and one in Limerick, as well as a big annual sustainability festival, Convergence, organized by the Sustainable Ireland Co-operative, held each April in Dublin. There is also a strong nascent natural building scene, and a lot of interest in the whole area of sustainability.

I‘ve been living in Ireland since 1996 and taught my first introductory course here in 1997. I teach regular courses here at The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability, as well as at other venues, but it wasn’t until I taught an evening class at a local college that I really considered the possibility of teaching through the Adult Education system.

The Kinsale Connection

I contacted a few colleges, and generally met with the response of ‘perma-what?’, but when I got in touch with John Thuellier, the Principal of Kinsale Further Education Centre, I got a hugely positive response. KFEC runs courses on a wide range of subjects, drama, art, photography as well as many outward bound skills, sailing, kayaking etc, and the permaculture course fitted in very well with his vision for the Centre. The first step was to get a module in permaculture recognized by the NCVA (National Council for Vocational Awards). This was relatively straightforward and is now there for anyone else who wants to teach permaculture in VEC colleges in Ireland (at some point it will be available to download on www.ncva.ie). We needed 15 people to make the course run and we hoped we might just make the numbers. In the end we had 24 students and we could have filled the course twice over such was the response.

This phenomenal response meant that we had a budget for a good mix of guest lecturers, allowing input from a range of people with skills in many different areas. The course is in 2 halves; the first is fairly classroom based, with trips to related projects, all building up to a big design project in January, where the students do a design for the whole college grounds. The second half is practical, implementing projects of the students’ choosing. This year’s students have chosen to build a straw bale/cob hybrid building with a grass roof and rammed car tyre foundations (which will be the subject of a future article), plant a forest garden, make living willow sculptures, plant a Celtic tree ogham wood and make a ‘Tea Spiral’, a herb spiral planted with herb tea plants for the students to use in their tea breaks.

The course in Kinsale has many advantages for me as a permaculture teacher. Firstly it is funded, meaning that I get paid, that there is a budget for materials and it is affordable for participants (the whole year long course costs €35!). It is working within the mainstream, which opens all kinds of interesting doors that working in the alternative sector doesn’t seem to.

Lastly, it is two days a week, which leaves me time to develop other projects, nurture my young family, and enjoy my garden. I very much agree with the opinion put forward by David Holmgren (the co-founder of permaculture) in his 1998 article, ‘Searching for Ways Forward’, where he said “there are substantial dangers in establishing a career structure for teachers which rewards them just for teaching. Having to do other things to stay sane, earn income, maintain humility and connection to the earth, and continually to learn are essential. ‘Professional teachers’ who do not garden or in other ways face the enlightening and frustrating realities of living and working with nature are in grave danger of reinventing all the problems we seek to overturn�.

Teaching Permaculture Creatively

Last summer I attended a workshop at Middlewood Centre for Environmental Excellence in Lancashire called ‘Teaching Permaculture Creatively’, which transformed my approach to teaching. Prior to the course I had a fairly standard ‘chalk-and-talk’ approach, with a few exercises, but still generally with me as the teacher and them as the students. While this worked up to a point, I still felt that for the students it was hard to concentrate over a long period of time, and for some of them it seemed to remind them too much of school. School was a traumatic experience for many people, and anything as a teacher you can do to minimize that feeling the better. For me as the teacher, being in that role of having to be The Font of All Wisdom can be very tiring and stressful and can add to a feeling of ‘apartness’ from the students.

The approach known as ‘Teaching Permaculture Creatively’ was developed by Skye and Robyn Clanfield and is set out in the manual of the same name (available from Permanent Publications?) It gives a brilliant description of the ideas behind creative teaching, how people learn and how the retain information. They state that if we read information, we retain about 10% of what we have read. If we hear someone talking about it we retain about 20%. If we hear someone talking about something as well as visually demonstrating it we retain around 50%. If we tell someone else about it, we can retain up to 80%, but the best way is to tell someone else about it and show them, which can retain up to 90%.

This has profound implications for how we teach. It confirmed for me that for the students to sit and listen to me for 2 hours, however fascinating a lecture I may be presenting, isn’t necessarily the best way for them to be able to retain the bulk of the information. Also people learn in very different ways. Some people are fine to sit and listen to talks, others need to do things. When teaching permaculture we should be striving to accommodate the full spectrum of ways in which people learn.

The course Rod Everett led took us through the whole approach and its applications. One of the things that really impressed me was at the beginning when Rod said “if you want to fall asleep during a session please do�. During the 8 day course there was usually at least one person snoring in the corner of each session (myself included!) which I found very liberating!

On the second day, Rod took us for a leisurely walk around Middlewood. We walked and chatted and looked at the buildings, gardens and tree plantings and so on. It was all very relaxed and by the evening I was feeling rather cross. “Here I am paying to do this course and what have we done so far today? Nothing…�. The next morning we began with a revision session (a very useful tool and something I do now on all my courses) and it was only then that it sank in how much we had actually learnt on our walk. All the chatting and asking questions, the discussions and the opportunity to see, feel and smell things meant that we had actually accumulated a lot of information – how reed beds work, basic passive solar design and much more. We had been taught without realizing we were being taught, a great skill.

Putting the Theory into Practice

Now, whenever I teach a permaculture course, I always begin by saying to the students, “what I would like you to take away from this course isn’t vast mental lists of forest garden ground cover plants or thermal ratings for straw bale walls, but rather a way of seeing�. Permaculture is like a pair of glasses you put on which allow you to see possibilities, that rubble-filled back yard as a food garden, your local community as a sustainable settlement, yourself as part of the hugely complex web of nature and the natural patterns which form the world around you. It is one of the best things for me as a permaculture teacher, that moment when the penny drops and people start seeing in that way.

Some of the exercises I do with the students can be seen in the accompanying panels. I always start every day with a revision session of the previous day, and once a month do a review of what has been done that month. The monthly review also gives an opportunity for feedback as to how people are doing with the course. I do revision sessions in different ways; usually pairing people up to do a five minute each way Think and Listen (one person thinks out loud about everything they can remember while the other person listens, and then for the second 5 minutes they swap over). I find this a very useful technique. I also use guided visualizations sometimes, taking the students through the day, and sometimes run the guided visualization backwards like a rewinding film. I also get students in pairs to devise their own revision activity for the following day.

I use a lot of games – I find they are great for building group energy, for reenergizing people when they start to nod off, and because people seem to learn better when they are enjoying themselves. Some of the games are very silly, some are more sensible, all of them are easy to learn and fun to play (good sources of games are ‘The Manual of Teaching Permaculture Creatively’ and ‘Silver Bullets’ by Karl Roenke). I also try and get the students to lead some of the sessions. So far we have had talks on low impact roundhouses, dowsing, and wine and beer making (where we made honey and apple mead which will be ready for the end of course party!).

In terms of timetables and preparing sessions, I have found ‘Permaculture Teacher’s Guide’ (edited by Andy Goldring) very useful. It gives an overview for a session on a particular subject, and you can then use that as a base to expand upon with your experience and research. Everyone who teaches a Design Course, while covering all of the essentials, plays to their own strengths and interests. I also try to always have a camera with slide film in wherever I go, it’s surprising the things that you see and think “oh, that’s a good example of such and such…�. Slides can be very effective teaching tools.

A Palette of Possibilities

To sum up, I love the palette of possibilities that permaculture gives people to paint with. A permaculture course gives people a chance to ‘test-drive’ a sustainable lifestyle, to immerse themselves in it for the duration of the course, to discover a practical vision of the change they have often felt the need for but not quite been able to put their finger on. For me, the essence of teaching permaculture creatively is that it allows me to reach people in a way that a more conventional approach doesn’t. People feel a sense of ownership of the course and are invited to customize it to suit their interests. I get a lot from it as a teacher, I learn a lot from the students, all of who come to the course with a wide range of experience and skills.

The first year of the Kinsale course has been a great success, the students are now beginning to discuss what they will do when the course is over, and have been coming up with some fascinating ideas. The grounds of the college have begun to be transformed, young trees getting established, the willow domes and tunnels breaking into leaf, clay plasters adorning the strawbale walls and the pond which was dug to obtain our cob building soil has filled and the puddled clay liner is holding well. There is already a lot of interest in the course for September, and I am eager to see what the grounds will look like after another couple of years of input from permaculture students. It is my hope now that many other colleges around Ireland pick up this course and run with it, and that through the mainstream education system we can be creating centers of environmental excellence all over the country. If the response to this one course is anything to go by, the time seems to be right for it.