Workshop Format and Content

The first part of the Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy workshop is learning about its interconnected components. Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy is a place-based workshop, therefore attendees learn information specific to place starting with their homes. We then expand the focus to encompass interconnections with the surrounding neighborhood and community, broaden the scale to encompass Southern California, and then finally illuminate interconnections with the nation, and the world.

The format for part of the first half of the day is teachback, which means that workshop participants are responsible for actively learning the information through doing the homework and then teaching the information back to each other. The teachback format empowers attendees to become experts on their own communities and on the material and energy flows that pass through their lives rather than turning to the workshop’s leaders as “experts”. Although the amount of (home)work may seem daunting, it is not assigned frivolously. We as your instructors recognize the power of questions to open doors in the mind where once there were none but walls in the form of perceptual blocks. To do the assigned topics justice out of respect for fellow workshop attendees and to honor your own learning process, you will need to invest some time in research and inquiry. Like many things in life, what participants get out of the homework effort will be proportional to the time and effort invested in it.

There are a few other components to the homework. Since there will be a potluck networking lunch, my co-presenter and I request that participants bring something to share. Since there is an emphasis on that which is local, we encourage you to bring food that is locally grown and harvested. We ask that participants collect a soil sample per homework instructions and bring it to the workshop. You will also need to bring a Google Earth printout of your garden’s site or your property and if you can’t bring that, you’ll need to pay your presenters a small fee to produce that printout for you for another interactive workshop exercise in the second half of the day.

Once the context for ecological literacy has been established, the second half of the workshop after lunch is solutions-oriented. My co-presenter and I are expecting that many of the attendees are going to be DIY types, so we are walking people through the fundamentals of site analysis (i.e. reading the land and using the information that you glean in a practical way to guide garden design and plant selection), landscape project management and sequencing, and applied ecological design and problem solving. Even if you are not doing more than planning for a small vegetable garden, there is still a logical, systematic approach to take that enhances the fertility of the soil and the health of your edible plants. There are systems that we can teach you that will greatly enhance your garden and landscape success. Steve and I have been using these frameworks and systems to benefit our clients, so we know that these same frameworks and systems will work for workshop attendees as well.

If you have ever taken a Permaculture intensive, like many of us who have, you found that you had to collaborate with others in the design process and then present to your classmates and the instructors at the end of the course in order to earn your certification. However, the challenge is that the foundational skills requisite for sound design have not been successfully conveyed or they have been taught poorly. More often than not, students do not have an opportunity to practice the basic skills with mentorship, even if they did learn them. What is often lacking in these intensives is instruction of a systematic process of site analysis and evaluation. Without observation practice, site analysis, and evaluation/synthesis skills, the rest of Permaculture’s and ecological design’s tools and techniques are wasted in poorly conceived, scattershot, and ineffectively piecemeal applications.

If you already know all there is to know about your air, watershed, and soil, where all your food comes from, where exactly your garbage and recycling goes, and the sources and sinks for all the renewable and nonrenewable material and energy forms that support your life, then you will find that the first half of the workshop is old hat. But, there’s no way that my co-presenter and I would offer the second half of the workshop’s practical problem solving content without establishing the context for why ecological design is needed and what you need to know as a foundation in order to begin to apply ecological design on your own projects. In other words, my co-presenter and I are retraining workshop participants to become systems thinkers. This will not necessarily be easy and it won’t feel ‘natural’, especially at first, but participants cannot hope to take a new approach towards their gardens and landscapes without changing the way they think about them. With a workshop of this type, attendees will inherently possess differential levels of skill and knowledge. Learning a new skill, such as a language, requires patience with yourself and practice. However we promise you that the rewards of learning applied systems thinking will be self-fruitful and beneficially long-lasting in ways that you probably cannot begin to anticipate.

Since the skills my co-presenter and I are teaching are only going to be as useful inasmuch as they are practiced, we will be holding follow up hands-on practicums and other workshops that ask attendees to apply what they have learned. Site analysis practicums will be held in the context of community. Only those who have attended the introductory workshop can participate in a practicum, which will be held at participants’ garden and landscape sites. These groups will be small to allow for ample time for observation, interaction, mentorship, and group collaboration on site evaluation observations and recommendations. Those who host will have the benefit of receiving the input of many minds while everyone benefits from the practice on actual urban and suburban garden and landscape sites.

Right Plants in the Right Places teaches a system by which the needs of plants can be consistently matched with what garden and landscape sites provide, while From Stumped to Pumped: Great Garden Results Guaranteed offers a tailored guide for DIY homeowners so that they may successfully achieve beautiful, easy to maintain garden results through a strategic plan while growing home equity and bolstering self-confidence.

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