2.2 Incorporating the twelve principles into teaching and learning
For their simplicity and transferability, the twelve permaculture principles can be integrated into higher education curriculum design as an essential structure for sustainable, and self-sustainable, thinking and action. But they can also become learning and teaching tools to ensure that what is taught and how it is taught, as well as what and how students – and ourselves as learners – learn, aligned with nature's principles.
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Transcript: Video 1 Incorporating the twelve permaculture principles into teaching and learning
Alessandra Campoli
For their simplicity and transferability, the 12 Permaculture Principles can be integrated into higher education curriculum design as an essential structure for sustainable and self sustainable thinking and action.
But they can also become learning and teaching tools to ensure that what is taught and how it is taught, as well as what and how students and ourselves as learners learn, align with nature's principles.
The first principle is observe and interact. This is the starting point of permaculture principles and actions in the garden. We need to observe when the fruit is ready to harvest and what plants need attention. Animals in the wild observe before moving to action.
To have a beneficial effect on any system, whether it is an ecosystem, a person or group, or even our own mental ecology, we need to develop an understanding of that system through observation and direct experience.
While the intellect is a phenomenal tool, being present with the experience of interacting with the system is irreplaceable. Observing patterns of behaviour, preferences, contradictions and habits allow us to see what is going well and what might need changing. Interacting in this sense is vital as there is no point in just observing. A dynamic and iterative approach to the observant interrupt principle may help us bring significant improvements and save us time and energy in the long run in whatever we plan or design.
And this leads us to the principles catch and store energy use and value renewable resources and services, and produce no waste. I combine here these three principles for their focus on energy and resources.
Ecological systems involve continuous energy storing and exchange. For example, all the energy to grow a forest that comes from the sun and rain, or from energy cycling within the forest itself. It is stored and keeps the forest healthy through a balanced exchange among the elements. Everything is used within the system and there is no waste. As humans, we need to work with our natural rhythms and energy levels to catch and store energy, and so do students for being sustainable and self sustainable and for greatest productivity.
And everyone needs to work on something they're passionate about. Our capacity increases when we feel a connection and purpose to activities. When that happens, people are more energetic and effective, making sure that the activities proposed to students are engaging, balance, connect to their passion, but are also clear and have aims and purposes that students are aware of will maximise their learning. In this way, our students would catch and store energy as the elements of a natural system. Educators and students can also share energy and become resources for one another. Knowledge and skills are renewable resources that should be valued. Peer sharing and peer feedback feedback, for example, could be renewable resources that generate A flux of energy. Those who help others learn should also be creative in producing new resources that can be cyclical and renewable, or in designing multifunction solutions to recycle an element into many different functions and produce no waste.
At the same time, nothing in terms of planning time or personal resources should go to waste when working within the learning communities. These principles guide the use of old talent, energy skills and knowledge of students or the wider community, ideas generated and power on hand.
To meet the above principles, time, space and a broad overview of the available resources and what is aimed to be achieved with those resources is needed. The principles designed for pattern to detail and use small and slow solutions encourage stepping back to take time and observe existing patterns as the first stage of the design process. This enables the designers to work out an overall pattern that seem to work well done.
Smaller details can be addressed. In nature. Every tree has the same pattern of roots, trunk and leaves, but they each has different details resulting in different species. In curriculum design, we should start with our pedagogical goals, the trunk routes and leaves to arrive at the end at the creation of tasks and assignments corresponding to the details making the different 3 speeches. This means that the activities we propose to our students do not stand alone single investigations of an element of knowledge or skill, but tie into the larger scope of intended outcomes. When designing a system from patterns to detail, we can also look at the overarching patterns of success from another system, which in curriculum design means looking at successful patterns in the existing educational framework that come from the structure. For a new curriculum, design, integrate rather than segregate, use and value, diversity, use and value, edges and marginal. These three principles have been grouped because they form the core of environmental and social sustainability and are critical to a sustainable and self sustainable approach to education. Edges are a central element in permaculture design. They are the interfaces between 2 ecosystems.
There are dynamic, fuzzy places that share, amalgamate and integrate characteristics from each of the adjoining places, as well as having a distinctive ecosystem themselves. Ages are marginal and diverse, and they get their value, richness, and productivity precisely by their marginality and diversity in nature. Diversity allows for an abundance of yield, diverse systems are more resilient and diversity is the basis of regenerative design,
McNamara states: By being aware of our boundaries, we can gently stretch ourselves into the new. Being open to other viewpoints and ways of doing things, we allow new information in and expand our knowledge base. Being conscious of times we are on edge, then appreciating it for its characteristics allows us to be brave and challenge ourselves, perhaps leading us to new and exciting possibilities. In designing planning, these principles should remind us to look for solutions at the edge of what is expected and in teaching to encourage our students to do the same, to value marginal ideas, the ones that seem outside the box or beyond the conventional. We should aim to emphasise how diversity in nature, society and the learning environment brings strength to the whole and encourage and make use of their diversity. And we should aim to create and allow for a diversity of opportunities and offerings in the curriculum.
The diversity of activities, methods and approaches allows us for an abundance of yield within the learning community. Yield is a recurrent concept in permaculture design and obtain A yield is one of the principles in nature. Grazing animals are continuously obtaining a harvest. Similarly, expanding the idea of yields increases our potential to get harvests from our activities. Job satisfaction fund growth and learning can be valued yields in the curriculum. Obtaining yields help us educators and learners to maintain motivation and momentum on our path. Rewards provide incentives for us and are much more satisfying when they come from the work itself rather than externally.
The last two principles are focused on constructive change. The first of the two is apply self regulation and accept feedback. Climate change is throwing ecosystems into turmoil. It is essential that we accept the feedback that the planet is giving us and self regulate our actions that we observe and interact. Just to go back to the first principle,
being open to feedback and learning to accept it as a suggestion for improvement is essential to our development as learners and humans. But it is also important to regulate how much we need to change or improve. To understand the scale of the change and improvement that are neededin curriculum development, we should aim at creating feedback loops in both the design and function of curriculum development.
Working with projects, we are encouraged to identify what is working and what is not working and ensure that systems are working well in classrooms. Teachers are encouraged to use a self regulation and evaluation and at the same time learners can be encouraged to create their own self regulation measures.
The last principle is creatively use and respond to change in nature. As Macnamara stays on bear thin soil, nature will click quickly. Colonise with pioneer plants. These plants often have the characteristic for being Hardy, producing a lot of leaf litter and setting seed quickly. These improve conditions, improve conditions for plant that need more shade and soil, and barren fields can eventually become forests. This process is called natural succession.
Change is inevitable and often we can't control it. Dealing with it constructively and creatively, adjusting to situations instead of resisting them, being flexible, are essential to develop resilience.
The proverb associated with this principle is vision is not seeing things as they are, but as they will be. The amount of change we can expect in the next decades due to climate change, food and water scarcity, migration, wars, and many other factors will be more significant that we have seen before in nature. It is change that produces diversity and evolution. Societal change demands A concomitant change in pedagogy that will help to foster a well balanced, ecologically minded, flexible, creative, critical thinking and problem solving population that can respond to and deal with that change.
In this sense, it is essential that the sustainable pedagogy is able to facilitate a transformative learning experience and that we aim towards what Sterling define learning exchange, which engages the whole person and the whole learning institution.
But before changing anything, we need to observe and think. And these links us back to the first principle. Observe and interact in an iterative and spiralling process aimed at continuous change, adaptation and improvement.
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Video 1 Incorporating the twelve permaculture principles into teaching and learning
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Activity 7.3 Putting permaculture principles into practice
Timing: Allow around 30 minutes
Task 1 Identifying key principles
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2. 
Write some notes in your learning journal in response to the questions above.
Task 2 Living on the edge?
Edges are an essential element in permaculture. Their richness and productivity are due to being the connecting point between two ecosystems and being a unique ecosystem in themselves. Edges can be natural, cultural and social.
- Have you ever stopped to observe edges in your own environment?
- What happens there?
- How do two ecosystems interact? This is how a new third ecosystem can be born.
- Can you imagine what happens in such a vibrant marginal space to allow a new ecosystem to take shape?
1. Explore the edges around you and reflect on them and their creative and transformative potential. If possible, creatively approach this activity by taking photos of your chosen ‘edges’ or sketching them. You can also use collage as a technique of joining two different images to make edges visible.
2. 
Share your outputs in the Activity 7.3 forum discussion.
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Task 3 Making your commitment
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2.1 Three ethics and twelve principles