Where the content and teaching of permaculture coincide harmoniously with the ethics
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Training Permaculture Teachers with Focus on Refugees (TPT4R) is an international teachers training course offered in English and organised by 12P Permaculture Design. The course will be available to PDC holders from any country.
The invasion of the Ukraine and the hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking asylum in the European Union has focused attention on the issue of mass migration. There is now a much greater opportunity to support displaced people by teaching and training refugees to teach and train each other. As the Permaculture for Refugees (P4R) international work group states, “Our aim is to support refugees in transforming the places where they live —be these refugee camps or communities in receiving countries — into productive permaculture-designed communities, and ultimately to equip them for integration into society for the collective benefit of all.” Following P4R’s definition, we use the term ‘refugee’ “interchangeably with asylum seekers, forced migrants, internally displaced peoples (IDPs), refugees and stateless person.”
Join us for an intensive training that will provide you with an invaluable toolkit to use in the classroom, as well as life in general. The internationally-renowned teacher Rosemary (Rowe) Morrow’s TPT4R course draws on her decades of permaculture teaching experience. Whether you are already a teacher, or thinking of becoming one, the TPT4R training makes teaching a transformative and fun exchange. Classrooms (indoor and outdoor) will never be the same again!
While this course has a specific focus in how to facilitate permaculture education with refugees, the TPT4R is designed for anyone who wants to teach permaculture based on Rosemary’s participatory learning methods. The course will help participants to:
– Change the way they think about education
– Move towards a permaculture teaching career
– Empower others with life-changing skills
– Learn to pass on knowledge of permaculture theory and practice in ways that creates real change in their students and activates entire communities
– Make connections with an international community of permaculture teachers
Where
The training will take place at the Permacultura Llobregat project located at the following ecovillage in Catalunya, Spain:
This new ecovillage is a community and a “cooperativa integral” – a cooperative developed to cover the housing, work, and food needs of its members. Located in an old textile factory an hour inland from Barcelona, the site is a village, inspired by the garden city movement, originally built for the workers and now being regenerated as a community. The site offers ample event and workshop spaces, 3 ha. of agricultural fields, and the enormous old factory itself. It is located alongside the second largest river in Catalunya, surrounded by forests and fields, and has a bus stop just outside the property that provides fast public transport to the city. The Permacultura Llobregat project will develop permaculture and regenerative agriculture here…and your participation will help us to grow. More info about the site HERE
When
Course Begins: Dinner on the night of Friday, May 26, 2023.
Course Ends: Certificate ceremony on the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 2023, followed by optional dinner, party and “No Talent Show”. Participants are welcome (and encouraged!) to stay the night and there will be a breakfast the next morning as well.
The TPT4R Facilitation Team
Lead Facilitators Onsite
Alfred Decker
Alfred Decker is an award-winning permaculture designer, a certified educator with the Permaculture Association of Britain, and one of Europe’s leading permaculture educators. Since his first PDC in 1998 in California, Alfred has been involved with social movements and projects throughout Europe and the Americas. He is the founder of the 12 Principles Permaculture Design consultancy, Permacultura Barcelona and the Forest Gardens project at Can Masdeu; is a co-founder of the Spanish Permaculture Academy (Academia de Permacultura Íbera); and was a member of the European Permaculture Teachers Partnership and the Permaculture Council of Europe. Alfred holds a post graduate diploma in sustainable architecture and renewable energy (Centre for Alternative Technology).
After taking this same teacher training course with Rosemary Morrow in 2011, he undertook a two year mentorship and later co-facilitated six courses as her assistant, ultimately earning a Diploma in Permaculture Education & Community Development in 2013 through the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute (Australia). Committed to furthering the training platform that Rosemary developed, Alfred facilitated 8 more teacher trainings as lead facilitator, co-edited the course manual, and organised a successful crowdfunding campaign to develop the platform. Rosemary has asked him to organise these trainings in Europe.
Alfred lives at the site of this training and is thrilled to organise this course at his community!
Habiba Youssef Abdel Aal
Habiba holds a degree in Economics and Sustainable Development, and has worked in international development focusing on the regenerative and sustainable use of natural resources for income generating activities aimed for the reduction of poverty in rural areas. She is the co-founder of La Bolina, an Andalusia-based association working on land regeneration, capacity and awareness building and socio-economical integration of migrants and refugees. Habiba is an expert in agroecology market gardens.
Yau Fan
Yau is a permaculture designer and facilitator. He did his first PDC in 2017 and afterwards took courses with Lesley Martin, Hugo Oliveira, Mirka Faya Hlavacova, Patricia Pereira, Helder Valente, Geoff Lawton, Daniel Halsey, Gerard Ducerf, and Elaine Ingham. Since taking a teacher training with Alfred Decker, he has taught 2 PDC and other permaculture courses for refugees in Brussels. Yau is in the process of designing a PDC for refugees together with Alfred Decker, Rosemary Marrow and the Permaculture for Refugees working group.
Sonita Mbah
Sonita Mbah is a passionate food grower, facilitator and Applied Permaculture Designer – Certified by German Permakultur Akademie. She has led Permaculture courses in Cameroon, Germany and Kenya. For over 10 years, she was the Administrator of Better World Cameroon and co-initiator of Bafut Ecovillage, an off-grid learning center North West of Cameroon. As Executive Secretary of the Global Ecovillage Network Africa, she brings regenerative community and social enterprise development to several African communities. Sonita received the Gender Just Climate Solutions Award by the Women and Gender Constituency for empowering women on the earthen cook stove technology and the One World Award for her work with the Global Ecovillage Network.
Guest Facilitators Online
Rosemary Morrow
Rosemary is known and loved worldwide as a permaculture teacher, practitioner, and activist. She has travelled the globe for four decades, often in countries shattered by war and disasters, sharing her passion for permaculture and social justice. Her belief is that access to useful knowledge is a basic human right.
Several years ago, Rosemary decided to focus on teacher training courses in order to have a “multiplier effect” believing that the bottleneck keeping permaculture from growing more rapidly is not a shortage of curriculum and experience, but rather a shortage of competent permaculture teachers. So she created this training to give people the skills and confidence needed to take the big step from being a practitioner to becoming a teacher.
Her pragmatic and effective approach working with and being lead by local people has created community-scale permaculture projects and outcomes across a broad range of environments from drylands in Ethiopia, to the wet tropics of Vietnam. The knowledge and experience she brings to creating abundance, food security and successful sustainable farming models is unparalleled in permaculture education today. She is the author of the Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture, the Earth User’s Guide to Teaching Permaculture, The Family Seedsaving Book, and A Good Home Forever.
Starhawk
Starhawk is an author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and a prominent voice in modern earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess and the ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, and its sequel City of Refuge.
Her most recent non-fiction book is The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, on group dynamics, power, conflict and communications.
Starhawk
This course is for…
PDC holders in any of the following fields: teachers and students of architecture, landscape design, school/community gardeners, local government community development officers, ecology and other disciplines including geography, regenerative agriculture and agroforestry as well as permaculture design. If you’re looking to do any type of sustainability or permaculture education/communication, this is the course you’ve been waiting for!
You will learn how to:
- Design a short or a long course
- Develop clear course outcomes and ethics
- Adopt appropriate body behaviour and use nonviolent communication
- Prepare learning resources and use teaching aids effectively
- Organise classroom and learning environments
- Work with a broad range of people from different cultures and backgrounds
- Draw on strategies that promote thinking and integrate practical experience
- Deliver clear explanations and concepts
- Explain the structure and function of the Permaculture Design Course
- Give engaging digital presentations
- Debrief, appraise, and apply other teaching techniques
- Work collaboratively in groups
- Practice teaching in a safe, supportive community of peers
We require all students to have completed a PDC (anywhere in the world) before the course starting date.
Fees
Our intention for this training is to fundraise as much as possible to offer scholarships to refugees and low income participants. We normally offer a sliding scale for this course, and ask participants to offer what they can pay. The scale is between €800-€1300 for this professional, certified training. Those who can afford to pay more on the higher end of the scale will help those who can only pay less. The sliding scale recognises the differences in economic reality depending on what country a participant comes from, as well as their individual circumstances, so this is a practical way that people with more resources can act in solidarity. We don’t offer reduced-fee work exchange options because this is an intense course, and we want every participant to be able to able to get the most out of it and not have to sacrifice learning because they can’t pay a certain amount.
Your fees include:
- Three healthy meals a day plus snacks, tea, and coffee (all mostly organic and local whenever possible)
- A teacher training certificate issued by the Permaculture Association of Britain
- A pack of digital teaching resources
- A new generation of permaculture teachers and doers for you to join!
- Participants who subscribe to Permaculture Magazine receive a 30% discount on Permanent Publications books and free postage and packing for the UK
- Option to buy a printed copy of Rosemary’s TPT Manual at the cost of printing (free download here)
In this time of climate emergency, we request that those who fly to attend the course will make a financial contribution to the Permacultura Llobregat Climate Fund, which will be presented during the TPT4R. The fund will promote carbon-friendly, regenerative agriculture here at the site.
Accommodation
You can choose to lodge in shared dormitory bedrooms or in a private bedroom. The cost of the dormitory is included in the price of the course, and a private bedroom costs 17€ per night extra (17€/night @ 9 nights = 153€ extra). If you have a medical need for a private bedroom and can’t afford the extra cost, please contact us.