We are very excited to announce that come August we’ll be running another Permaculture Teacher Training with the one and only Rosemary Morrow.

This is an intensive course designed to empower students to become downright excellent teachers of permaculture  and holistic design in all sorts of contexts; straight up short courses, kitchen garden programs, community building programs, you name it… 

Rosemary Morrow is very well known for her pragmatic and effective approach to creating Permaculture systems across an incredibly broad range of environments.

We love Rosemary Morrow’s approach to teaching so much that we’ve aimed to put every teacher that teaches with Milkwood through Rowe’s teacher training program (where possible, of course).

What do we love about this superb teacher’s approach so much?

Firstly, we love the focus on student outcomes  – Rowe trains teachers not to be a ‘listen to everything i know’ kind of teacher, but rather an educator that draws students out and ensures they leave the learning with a competent understanding of the subject, from first principles down.

When training teachers, Rowe talks about “must knows, should knows and could knows” – the must knows are the fundamentals that students must leave the course with a deep understanding of, in order to effectively make use of the knowledge.

Rowe once explained this facet of her approach to me like this:

“Say you’re in another country, and you’re working with locals to build water security for low energy, regenerative agriculture.

You don’t start by showing them how to make a swale, or how to construct a ram pump, because then you’re potentially just transplanting what techniques have worked for you in the past, somewhere else, with a different resource base, climate and all the rest.

You start with first principles: keep the water high. High water is stored energy of the most beautiful, potent form, no matter what sort of system we’re talking about.

Once you’ve all figured out how to do that given the local context, the locals will largely design the rest of the system, with perhaps a few suggestions here and there.

And they’ll do a far better job of it than you ever could, in terms of designing a context-appropriate solution for their needs.”

We’ve taken Rowe’s approach on board and to heart with how we teach permaculture (and everything else) at Milkwood to make sure that each course is an outcome-driven experience for everyone involved.

And so – every other year or so, we convince Rosemary Morrow to teach just one more Permaculture Teacher Training course. And this is it.

We’re doing this because we want (and as a society we need) more people to make the jump from doing a Permaculture Design Course to teaching permaculture darn well.

In schools, in towns, in councils, in communities, in backyards and front yards and in universities too.

And this is a fabulous path to turning that fire in the belly into a professional skill that you can use to make real change.

For anyone interested, there’s a whacking 15% discount for Milkwood Permaculture Design Course grads, and a 15% off bundle option to kickstart your permaculture career with our July PDC (with David Holmgren) and the August Teacher Training.

And we’re offering a scholarship place for this Teacher Training course also – i’ll have more info on that by next week.

Excited? So are we. We’re holding this course at a peaceful retreat in the rainforest at Otford, just south of Sydney – beautiful surroundings, deeply excellent learning. We can’t wait.

More info here: Permaculture Teacher Training: Aug 2014: Otford