With the support of CBEEN’s Professional Development Bursary Program, Heather Keczan from Nelson recently attended the Permaculture for Educators Course in Portland. This week-long course was for educators to gather at a Permaculture demonstration site and learn best practices for teaching and facilitating permaculture programs in schools and communities.

In Heather’s words…

I learned how we can apply Permaculture principles to designing curriculum, and explored a few lived examples of thriving Permaculture education programs. I can also talk extensively now about the ins and outs and starting any school garden or farm to table education program. We had a visit from Micheal Becker at Hood River Middle School which was very inspiring: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/permaculture-classroom-systems-based-approach-michael-becker

I was also able to bring my own children to participate in the the Children’s Permaculture camp that went alongside the course. It was important for the educators there to be able to witness Permaculture education on site. This photo is one where they got to teach the teacher about something they knew from Canada called “Bannock” (a term the American teachers hadn’t heard before) that they then turned into fruit pizza using figs and berries from the farm.